New Blood

by Shane Lusher

  “Where are you going with this?”

  “I was just thinking, what if both guns were used in the shooting?”

  “That’s a pretty big stretch, man,” Rassi said. “There was never more than one gun in the locker. Anyway, Dubois' gun is long gone by now. It’s probably at the bottom of the river.

  “Anything else?” he asked. “Because I’m going in right now.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Ulrich Anderson. What do you know about him?”

  “That old German guy?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “I forgot to tell you. He came by yesterday before I went out to Trueblood’s. Warned me off Tad’s case.”

  “Uh-huh,” Rassi said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Just thinking. Anderson’s on the county board, or at least he was, last I checked.”

  “Checked?”

  “Figure of speech,” Rassi said. “I’ve seen him around the courthouse a few times. Trying to remember if I ever saw him with Dubois. I don’t think so.”

  “Think I should talk to him?”

  “Can’t hurt,” he said.

  I turned and looked down Elizabeth Street. Tuan Nguyen had just pulled up to the curb and was negotiating his way out of his car. He looked up when he got to the sidewalk, gave me a quick nod and then unlocked the door to the Observer.

  “All right,” I said.

  Over the phone I heard someone saying something about a ten dollar cover, and then a pause and then the same someone saying that police officers got in for free.

  Membership had its privileges.

  Rassi laughed. “There’s a woman dancing here I think I went to grade school with,” he said.

  “I have to go,” I said and started walking toward the newspaper office.

  “Hey, Dana,” Rassi said.

  “Yeah?”

  “When you talk to people? Just assume everybody has something to hide. Everybody’s guilty in some way.”

  The line went dead, and I looked at my phone for a moment. Something didn’t feel right. Rassi should have been as distressed as he seemed the night before, and now it was as if the events of the previous day had never happened. He had either made the whole thing up, or he was hiding something.

  He certainly didn’t seem in fear for his life.

  Either way, there were precious few people I could talk to about it.

  I’d just walked down to the Observer and was about to open the door when my phone rang. I took it back out of my pocket and swiped to answer.

  “Dana Hartman,” I said.

  “Dana, this is Randy Dubois,” he said.

  “Sheriff,” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral. “What can I do for you?”

  “I wanted to let you know personally that Dave Rassi has been suspended from the department.”

  I decided to play dumb. “Suspended?” I asked. “Why?”

  “There were some discrepancies with his handling of case materials,” he said. It sounded rehearsed, stilted.

  “What sort of discrepancies, Sheriff?”

  Dubois snorted. I heard the click of a cigarette lighter and then he exhaled.

  “I’m not messing around here, Hartman,” he said. “I told you to stay away from Roe and Sweeney. I want those case files back today. This morning. Now.”

  “I’m not sure what-”

  “Don’t play dumb,” Dubois said, and then I heard a whoosh like a door close and he raised his voice slightly.

  “You know how you stand, and you know why. It’s not going to be long before Wayne Trueblood gets tired of you not figuring out who killed his daughter, and then you can go back to whatever it is you do with your computer. You get those files back here. It’s bad enough already. And whatever you do, you do not discuss anything with Dave Rassi.”

  “What happened?” I asked. I was looking through the window of the Observer. Through a glass pane at the back of the front room, I could see Nguyen working in his office, holding up sheets of paper and then running them through a scanner.

  Dubois took a drag on his cigarette. “Tasha Roe has filed a wrongful death suit against the Sheriff’s Department and the Office of the Coroner, alleging suppression of evidence in her husband’s murder,” Dubois said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You were out there yesterday. This is what happens when you go poking around.”

  One knock on the door does not a lawsuit make. “So she’s suing because I asked a few questions?” I asked. “Doesn’t sound like she’s got much of a case, if my stopping by her house is all she’s got.”

  “It’s not all she’s got,” Dubois said. “I think you know that already, so don’t get cute with me.”

  If the coroner’s office was being sued, then Kelly would know what was going on. Someone must have leaked the information about the partial arrowhead wound in Darren Roe’s head.

  “Why don’t you tell me what I know, Sheriff?” I said quietly. “Who in the sheriff’s department is supposed to be responsible for the death of her husband?”

  He ignored me. “Roe and Sweeney case files,” he said. “This morning. Now. I want you in here by eleven o’clock. You can pick up your subpoena while you’re at it. Save us the gas.”

  “My subpoena?”

  “Tasha Roe’s lawyer has named you as a witness.”

  “Witness to what?”

  “To your brother’s suppression of the evidence her husband gave him before he was killed. She wants us to hand over the information, and she figures that the court will be more lax regarding the evidence in a civil case as opposed to a criminal one.

  “Which it will be,” he concluded.

  Still. You couldn’t file for wrongful death unless you had some kind of evidence tying the sheriff’s department into Roe’s death. The burden of proof is much less in civil court than in criminal, but you do have to have something. I wondered just what, exactly, that might be.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. “Sheriff?”

  The line had gone dead.

  Seventeen

  Tuan was in his office with the door shut, his twenty-seven-inch flat screen monitor positioned in front of him on the desk so that no one looking through the window in the wall could see that he had his laptop and scanner on the table behind it in front of him.

  He’d given the job of proofreading to the two interns sitting out front. It was his way of breaking them in. Even with spell checker, which it seemed very few people in this world knew how to use, mistakes still went undetected, and if Tuan was anything, he was a grammar Nazi.

  The interns were quiet, working side-by-side at the terminals that faced each other. They both sat at ninety degree angles to Tuan, and neither one of them was looking over.

  Still, you couldn’t be too careful.

  He had placed his laptop and the portable scanner right next to each other and run the monitor down its stand until it was sitting nearly flat on the desk. The scanner was, luckily enough, the kind where you slid the material in face-down.

  He had no desire to look at the photographs. He knew the content already. He’d already sifted through hundreds of them over the past twenty years, and there was not anything profound, anything new, to be found in there.

  He also understood the risks involved in scanning images of this caliber into his private computer, but that risk was minimal. He also didn’t have much of a choice. The hard copies had to be destroyed, but they also had to be recorded, and once he had everything encrypted on a memory stick, the only devices capable of cracking them resided with the National Security Agency.

  Then it was only a matter of minutes before any trace of their existence would be completely wiped from his private laptop.

  He was no expert on forensic computing, but he did know that the way the police found deleted files was essentially by looking for the shadows of what was left on the empty spaces on the hard drive. It was never t
he actual file that was removed, but the index pointing to it. The file just sat there until it was covered up by something else.

  A deleted hard drive was merely a mass of negative space, and investigators could highlight that space like running a charcoal pencil over a piece of blank notebook paper in order to ascertain what had been written on the torn-out sheet on top of it.

  But if you filled it up with garbage, everything got written over. No more negative space.

  He popped out the stick and clicked on the shortcut that would execute a script he’d written himself. An hour from now, the entire laptop would be reformatted, its operating system and applications reinstalled, and all 1.5 terabytes of memory filled with meaningless travel images downloaded automatically from the internet.

  * * *

  Kara had run the Sweeney bit the day before, and in spite of hanging around the sheriff’s office for a half hour that morning, hoping to talk to Dave Rassi, who usually at least confirmed what he’d been thinking, he hadn’t heard anything new. And Rassi wasn’t picking up his phone, either.

  The department had a hushed quality about it he found to be suspect, and even Janine, who usually at least gave him something to go on, was adamant about not revealing anything.

  “Is Dave Rassi not in today?” he’d asked, leaning over on the counter.

  “Can’t tell you that,” Janine had said. “Boss’s orders.”

  “What’d he do, get arrested?” Tuan grinned at her and stood up, pulling at his waistband.

  “Can’t tell you that,” Janine repeated.

  “Well, can I at least talk to Randy?”

  “He’s not in,” she said. “If you want, I can tell him you stopped by.”

  She gave him a neutral smile and raised her eyebrows, her hand resting on the telephone.

  He’d taken his cue and left.

  It was to be expected, and he’d experienced it before. Something got leaked from the sheriff’s department, like the information about the arrow, and then Dubois clamped down on what went out of the office. Most likely he’d found out Rassi had been his source for the past year or so and was keeping him hiding in the back.

  When Tuan had blown the story about Dubois' shady dealings with the county motor pool six years before—though that had been a low one, even for small town print media—he’d been locked out for months. He’d had to send over new recruits, who were easily discouraged, and who turned away without a fight.

  Of course, Tuan could hardly blame Dubois. It had, after all, cost him his job.

  It was always the same. It had been the same with Ely, too, but at least he’d been more forthright about issuing press statements.

  Tuan knew that they’d come around eventually. Someone would contact him, he’d drive over, drink some coffee, and that would be that. He always got the information first, he or Kara, and so he wasn’t worried about it.

  One of the interns got up and came over to open the door to his office. Tuan closed his laptop and slid a stack of papers over the top of it.

  The intern, Jared Scally, looked at the photographs, still face down, on his desk.

  “What you got there, Tuan? Porn?” he asked.

  If you only knew.

  Tuan smiled. “Nothing,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “We finished sports, got all the obituaries down. You want me to start on the metro section? Everything’s in. Kara did that thing on the Waverly.”

  The Waverly was the art museum in Peoria, which was forever failing at becoming great because no one donated enough money to actually fund real art.

  Which could be said about many institutions in Central Illinois.

  “Sure, Jared,” Tuan said, giving him a million-dollar grin. “That sounds great.”

  Jared nodded, paused and then walked out the door. He was a good kid. He would have reminded Tuan of himself at that age, except that Jared was white and came from an intact family. No hunger for him. No hunger, and no barbed wire.

  Jared sat down at his terminal and said something to the other intern, Angelica Garcia. She laughed and glanced over at Tuan, and when she saw him staring at her, she frowned and turned back to her terminal.

  They were working for free, but they acted as if they punched the clock every time they walked in. Tuan didn’t know who the parents were who raised such kids. He just knew they deserved a medal, whether they knew it themselves or not.

  The laptop had just finished its final reboot when his cell phone rang.

  It was a number he didn’t recognize.

  “Tuan Nguyen,” he said.

  “Tuan,” a man’s voice intoned. “This is Dana Hartman.”

  “Dana,” Tuan said. “Always a pleasure.” He glanced out through the glass at Jared and Angelica and then dragged the shredder at his feet out from under the desk.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m not sure if you know about this, but I’m working with the sheriff’s department on the Colby Trueblood murder.”

  Tuan paused, the sheaf of photographs in his hand. Now this was something new.

  “You are?” he said. “That’s interesting.”

  “Yeah,” Hartman said. “You probably already knew about that.”

  Tuan wiggled his mouse and logged in to his work computer. He brought up his browser and started checking headlines in the Peoria Journal Star.

  “Um, no, actually, I didn’t,” Tuan said.

  “I thought you knew everything,” Hartman said.

  Nothing had run in the paper about that yesterday. He keyed in a quick Google search, found nothing about Dana Hartman he didn’t already know.

  “Not everything,” he said quietly.

  “Anyway, I was wondering if I could stop by around four, take up about fifteen minutes of your time,” Hartman said.

  “You can come by right now, if you want,” Tuan said. Four o’clock. It wasn’t pushing it, but if he needed to do follow-up, it would be cutting it tight.

  “I’ll try to be earlier, but I have a lot to do today,” Hartman said.

  “Well, can you let me know what you need to talk about?” Tuan asked. He stomach growled, and he looked at his watch. Ten o’clock. Time for a scone.

  “I got to run,” Hartman said. “Sorry.”

  “I understand,” Tuan said. “Well, I’ll be here all day. Stop by whenever you want. And Dana?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you talking to anyone else about this?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Have you contacted any other news people?”

  “Oh,” Hartman said. “No, Tuan. I, uh, hey, could you not put that out? I hadn’t really thought-”

  “Tell you what,” Tuan said. “Let’s talk about it when you get here.”

  Hartman hung up, and Tuan looked down at the photos in his hands.

  He slid them into his desk drawer and locked it with a key.

  Then he picked up the phone and dialed Wayne Trueblood.

  Eighteen

  After I got off the phone with Nguyen, I went around the square and drove down Court Street. On my way past the hospital, I remembered that I’d promised Vic Daniels that I would try to meet him for lunch. I pulled over next to a fire hydrant and fished his card out of my pocket.

  “This is Vic,” he said when he picked up. “What can I do for you?”

  “Hi Vic, Dana Hartman,” I said.

  “Dana,” he said. “Glad you called. Can you come by around twelve?”

  “I can’t make it for lunch,” I said. “Do you think we can just do this over the phone?”

  Vic paused. “I really would rather see you in person,” he said.

  After he didn’t continue, I asked, “What is this pertaining to?”

  “I’d really rather not say,” he said.

  He’d rather not say. Fine with me. I might have been pissed off if I had any other leads, but since Vic was the only person who’d actually approached me, I figured I’d better make time for him.

/>   “Can we make it one-thirty?” I asked.

  “Stomach will be hurting by then,” Vic said. “But I can always use an excuse to have another donut. We can do that, yeah. You know The Wilson, in Morton? On Jefferson?”

  I had just put my car in drive when a sheriff’s cruiser ran by. I caught Percy Trueblood’s face for a brief instant as he honked and continued on down Court Street. He turned right on 14th and sat there, his motor idling, blocking the entrance to the hospital parking garage.

  As I continued on past him down Court I watched him. He was looking straight out the windshield. I couldn’t be sure if he was following me with his eyes or not, and so I kept him in my rear view mirror. I made sure that he hadn’t moved, until I lost sight of him behind a stand of trees.

  As I passed the stadium, I wondered if Dubois was having me tailed, and why it was that I wasn’t worried about it.

  Since Jake’s death I hadn’t really cared about much of anything, a big part of which was my personal well-being, and I had to keep reminding myself that I needed to be there for Erin.

  That bothered me; that I had to remind myself about that. The kid was only nine years old, and she’d already lost her mother and her father. She needed me to stick around a little longer.

  Maybe it would have been better to just drop the case. I thought about the break-in the night before, and wondered if it was too late for that already.

  OU812 was still playing in the cassette deck. The 1980s; The Me Decade.

  Maybe it was time for me to start carrying a gun.

  I made it out to the farm and back in forty-five minutes, pausing at the house to take another look around. It was good that the social worker wasn’t coming by for a while. I wondered when I would have time to clean the place up again.

  After I’d done another sweep to look for missing items, I grabbed the Roe and Sweeney files and drove back to the sheriff’s department.