A Ballad of Wayward Spectres: Day 1

by William B Hill

CHAPTER IV

  An orange light flashed in Martin’s face. He didn’t flinch.

  He laid his head down on his arm about ten minutes before the computer flashed the little indicator. He tapped his pen on the table with his other hand, making a spotty mess on the report he’d been writing. He tossed the pen aside, and hid the blinking light with his thumb. The light shone through an opaque red cloud glowing under his nail.

  Martin groaned, and slid back in his chair, bumping the desk with his knees. He picked up the stray pen, and stuffed it into the HPD 121 coffee cup that held the rest of his writing tools.

  The same coffee cup was employed on every desk in the station for the same role, aside from the cheerful bastards who decorated their workspace with family portraits, furniture, and other décor from home. The chipped black particle board desks held internally mounted computers, and were positioned in rows of five on each side of the room, separated by a thin metal divider between every desk. No one was given more room than Rich, the chief detective, thought that they should need. A pair of stiff cushioned chairs was placed in front of the desk in every cubicle. Some of them also had a metal folding chair leaned against the divider. Martin always found the trios who fought over the cushioned chairs amusing; he preferred the metal ass-groove of the folding chairs far more comfortable than the cardboard and foam stuffing of the other furniture.

  The dissonant clatter of deskwork, boot stomps, and bitter despondent complaints stole what concentration Martin had gathered when he’d sat down to write the report. He missed having a car to write his reports in. After two weeks of leave, his car was still in the shop for repairs.

  Rich hadn’t taken the time to say hello since Martin sat down. The door had opened and closed a few times, but he hadn’t stepped into the pit with the rest of the dogs. Martin hadn’t seen anything about reassignment, or even if he would be given a new partner.

  He was bored.

  Martin fished around in his breast pocket, tossing out a pair of notebooks and his lucky charm – a broken hook-and-cross pin – before finding a tiny pack of mint gum. He tossed one of the little green rectangles in his mouth, and let it sit under his tongue for a moment before throwing the package into the pen mug.

  He sighed, staring at his incomplete report, and tried to focus once again. He sought words, but couldn’t find them.

  How do you justify what they call failure when you’re feeling apathetic about the whole damned thing?

  Martin sat around his house for two weeks listening to records and screwing around on his guitar, never coming to terms with his forced leave. He heard the whispers of his comrades when he’d walked in that morning, and their silence as he past. Still, they didn’t bother him. 

  He knew, better than most of the officers that spread their rumors and made their idle chatter, that their line of work came with a body count, and Martin wasn’t ashamed to pull the trigger when the time came.

  His partner wasn’t so bold, and it had cost him.

  As Martin sat down to spell that message out, he found that saying they were carrying assault rifles, and I didn’t feel like fucking around reading them their rights didn’t read well in review.

  Martin scribbled a few more lines in the document, and tucked it away in the folder.

  He stood up, replaced the objects from his pocket, and slid the document into the inbox by Rich’s office.

  Ten-thirty and I’m done for the day, Martin thought as he walked away from the door.

  Rich’s office door screeched as it slid across the rusty track. “Heads up,” he called with firm baritone. “Wood, Peters, Clarke; get over to the briefing room. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  Martin watched Rich pause as Reggie Peters and Lawrence Wood rose from their cubicles, and left into the hall. Rich stood with a hand stuffed in his pocket, and the other gripping a thick folder at his hip. His tie was undone, hanging away from his neck. He’d forgotten to shave, and his thick black hair was slick with grease and tucked just behind his ears.

  Must have been hell since I left, Martin noted. He followed Peters and Wood out into the hallway. Martin swallowed a chuckle when he noticed that Wood hadn’t bothered to tuck in the tail of his striped dress shirt, and left his jacket behind. He scrubbed a bit of dandruff out of his hair, mumbling with Peters about what they thought might be going on. Peters sauntered through the corridor with muscular hands stuffed in the pockets of an old blazer, fraying at the tails.

  The bitter glow of fluorescent light drowned above the plain white and gray hall. The briefing room was about sixty yards down the hall from the office suite that Martin and his colleagues occupied, and shared the dismal. A projector system hung from the ceiling. Martin thanked God for the dimmer switch. He could hide in the back and sleep while Rich and one of the seniors dealt a wealth of useless information and blind speculation.

  Martin knew that other precincts had been upgraded to qGlass systems and similar smart board technology, depending on when the hardware was installed. HPD 121 was stuck with an ancient video projector and a black-streaked dry erase board.

  Martin got a kick out of watching Rich fumble with the six or seven markers that sat on the ledge beneath the white board, trying to find the one that still wrote. He often finished the meeting by shouting a profane announcement that they needed to order more markers and throwing the dried up markers in the trash. The trashed set of pens would surface under the board in time for the next meeting.

  Rich stepped into the room and dialed down the lights in the back, signaling Martin to slide to a comfortable angle in his seat.

  A man of a mixed French-Hispanic descent followed Rich in. Martin assumed that he couldn’t be older than thirty-five. His face was locked in a blank gaze, his jaw hiding lines of age or definition, and his eyebrows formed a straight line parallel with trimmed pitch black hair. He kept his hands close together, gripping a thick brown folder with a Four Nations International seal on the cover, positioned over a the buttons of a black suit jacket from a designer that Martin was too poor to have ever heard of. The folder looked similar to the one that Rich had been holding outside of his office.

  “Good morning. I guess I’ll start by introducing our guest. This is Michel Rojas. He’s going to be assisting us with an investigation that we’ve just been…”

  Martin noted Rich’s pause, watching his stalwart commanding officer shift his gaze away from the small audience to the statuesque gentleman that was invading his briefing room.

  "That we’ve been invited to take part in.”

  The words were snide. Martin felt a shiver run up to his fingertips. He started to tap out a fast and silent quarter-time beat on his legs.

  Rich pulled a wireless keyboard out of a drawer on the podium, retrieved a file from his records. “Alright, consider everything you hear in the next fifteen minutes or so to be completely confidential. Regardless of what happens when your investigations begins, you will not speak to press on the matter, or divulge any information regarding this case. Our precinct has little to no jurisdiction on this matter, and we will not make it ours to discuss.

  “About two hours ago, Tomas Dekare, an Executive Operations Supervisor for Four Nations Bank was found dead in his home just outside of town.” The image changed on screen swapped to a set of early forensics diagrams, including a photo of the body, with locations of several stab wounds marked in yellow, and then a 3D projection of the body, depicting the depth and width of each wound. A list of possible murder weapons was positioned below. All of the blades seemed to be basic kitchenware.

  “The murder weapon, or possibly weapons, weren’t found on the scene. Forensics can’t seem to decide whether this was done with one knife, or several different blades. They’re still working on it.

  “His wife, Marina, was sighted leaving home about ten minutes before the incident was called in. So far, some elements are listing her as our prime suspect, but all of the evidence available is circumstantial,” Rich said. He threw
Mr. Rojas a dagger-like stare.

  “Central 1 is leading up the murder investigation in coordination with Four Nations internal security.”

  Martin nodded, unsettled. Corporate intrusions always made the job a living hell, and dirtier than normal. It would be another layer of red tape, another set of rules which often contradicted the ones he was familiar with. And having the stiff hanging around the office, counting the sugar packets that he put in his coffee didn’t add to the appeal.

  “Peters, Wood; you’re going to go down to Four Nations to question Mr. Dekare’s coworkers. Mr. Rojas here believes that they might have some evidence to further indict Mrs. Dekare.

  “Martin?” Rich continued.

  Martin perked up on response, faking interest. The suit wasn’t going with Peters and Wood. Dread filled his every vein.

  “Mr. Rojas will join you on a drive to the airport. You’re going to collect Mrs. Dekare before her flight.”

  “Okay…am I arresting her?”

  “I don’t think that’ll be necessary. Just go down there, and meet with her in the terminal. I don’t even think that you should take your gun. Just go in, fill her in on the situation, and bring her back here.”

  “I guess she wouldn’t be interested in starting a fight in the middle of the airport; too many guards.”

  Rich nodded in agreement. “Bring her in for questioning.”

  Martin warped his face into a thin smile to mask his irritation. He stood, and stuffed his hands in his pocket. “I’ll be out the door then, but I am taking my gun.”

  “What the hell for?” Rich chuckled.

  “Because I’m not a fucking taxi driver.”

  Judith Berkshire’s office door was cracked just a little bit, allowing Alyson to glance at the occasional passerby.

  She’d worked quickly, knowing that the conference could end at any moment. Closed circuit camera feeds were loaded onto Judith’s computer, eyeballing the security center and the conference room, and her extraction plan. It didn’t take long to find a mark, but the remaining setup more difficult than she’d expected.

  Marina Dekare’s ID page file was loaded on Alyson’s mobile after she’d reprogramed all of the security protocols on the Four Nations application to accept both her accounts and her profiles. Alyson wasn’t surprised by the heavy security measures, given the wealth that she and her husband appeared to possess.

  Marina’s flight, United 193, was on the runway, third in line for takeoff. Alyson considered the First Class ticket and deep pocketbook a sign that her luck was finally changing.

  Few of Alyson’s marks kept that much money available on their personal expense accounts and even fewer made that money available via mobile applications.

  The details came next; a business meeting formed the heart of the script, involving a Swiss nationalist attempting to import solar batteries to Europe from an American production facility. Given the billionaire’s well publicized racist tendencies, she plugged a series of pigment augmentation treatments into Mrs. Dekare’s transaction history. Two weeks of timed-decay injections filled enough of the important details, even though it turned Alyson’s stomach to write such a line into the play. Of all of the players in Houston that day, she could only pair Marina with the bigoted European and keep the illusion intact.

  Since the meeting would be less business and more about how a low-cut dress could sway a rich man’s wallet towards the States, she scheduled a cab driver to pick her up on the corner, and wrote down a short shopping list. She tied the ends, and packed up her equipment, leaving a mess on Ms. Berkshire’s screen for when the conference was over.

  Alyson crept into the hall, leaving the door open. She checked behind her, and slid away, taking full confident strides towards the elevator. The glossy allure of sterile office spaces blank corridors wove around the central elevator shaft, doing little to draw Alyson’s attention from her exit strategy. She pitied the people settled in their cubicles, blind to the intruder that slipped through their office, completely unaware of the crimes committed on their system. She wanted to laugh, or maybe just grin wildly at what she got could get away with.

  Alyson stopped at the elevator opening, dropped her mobile into her hand, and switched back to the Psataria security interface. She killed the cameras with a single keystroke, and stepped inside, sending the lift to the first floor.

  She stepped out, and sauntered out the front door to meet the cab waiting for her at the end of the block.

  “Where to?” the driver asked as she stepped into the car.

  “Several places, and there’s a big tip in it for you if you wait around.”

  Curtain call approached. Alyson took a few minutes to clean her details, rehearse her script, and practice Marina’s signature as she gathered her costume for the opening act.