by M. A Wallace
Michael followed behind as he walked up the wide wooden steps. By the time he reached the third floor, he found his legs becoming sore. When they reached the fifth floor, he found himself breathing heavy. Even though he exercised every day during the week, age still caught up with him now and then. In the service, he'd been able to carry around a heavy rucksack that weighed ninety pounds or more while he hiked around in the desert, his feet swelling up with blisters, sweat pouring down his face. Now walking up five flights of stairs with nothing heavier than a handgun on his hip wore him out. He plodded on, trying not to think about what his partner must be going through.
Mindy led them down a hall at the end of which was found another stairwell and, across from it, room 525. She knocked on the door, then inserted the duty key into the lock. No one called out from inside. She pulled it open to reveal a small room, smaller than Michael's living room. Two beds sat on opposite sides of the room, one unmade with purple blankets strewn about, the other completely bare, leaving nothing to the imagination as to how little money the university spent on beds.
She said, “This is it. She gave her notice that she was moving out yesterday afternoon. She's already turned in her keys and such.” A pause while she looked around the room. “Can I ask exactly what you're looking for? Maybe I can help.”
Billy strode into the room, scanning everything he saw. He said, “Could you please wait outside? Seems like this won't take long.”
“I'm sorry, I have to stay in here to supervise you both.”
Billy glanced back, hands on his hips. He said, “And I suppose you're going to file a report on us when we're done.”
“Yes, I have to. That's the rules.”
Michael took several moments to survey the room. Since there was no way of telling what Shannon had taken with her and what she had left behind, he had to search everything in the room. It was possible that she had not wanted, or had not been able to, carry out everything she owned. In that case, she might have let her roommate have the remainder of her property.
He started by pulling the mattress off the bed to see if anything lay underneath. A wire box-spring frame sat over an area of the floor that was littered with candy wrappers and dust bunnies. A sample size bottle of shampoo sat next to a bedpost. He replaced the mattress while Billy went about inspecting the absent roommate's possessions. He opened up drawers to a small nightstand, looked behind a seventeen-inch flat screen television, then pulled up the other mattress as well. While Michael went through empty drawers, he heard Billy say, “There's a flashlight here.”
He held it up before him and pressed a black button with his thumb. A beam of light shot forth from the flashlight, hitting Michael on the chest. Michael said, “It's blue. All the others were black.”
Billy turned off the flashlight and put it down. He said, “This is a generic one you can get from Walmart. There's no number on the bottom.” He tossed it on the bed and said, “There's really not much here. Did you find anything?”
“Nothing, looks like she took everything she had. She wasn't lying when she said she travels light. There's hardly any room in here to put anything. What do you think she did with her textbooks? Those must have been really heavy, huh?”
Billy closed the drawers he had opened. He said, “Now that you mention it, she would have had trouble carrying anything out, wouldn't she? She must have had help. Well...all I found were DVDs full of pornographic material. There's no DVD player here, so presumably she watches it on a laptop.”
Michael stood up. He had been crouching to see everything that had been placed on the floor. “All right, I think we've intruded enough. What we're looking for isn't here. If she didn't throw it away, she took it with her.”
Mindy stood on her tiptoes when she spoke up. She said, “We don't take the trash out until Monday morning. If you're looking for something she threw away, it will still be here until then.”
Michael took out his notepad and wrote down a few notes. He said, “That's a great help. We just might do that. Do you know offhand if the trash here is considered university property or not?”
“Umm...I don't know. Isn't it abandoned property? Like anyone can claim it? I'm not sure.”
Billy took out a handkerchief to wipe the dust off his hands. He said, “All right, Mindy, you've been very helpful. That's all for now, if you don't mind.”
She piped up, “Oh, oh. And, if you don't mind, can I see your warrant, please? I'd hate to think you walked in at random and just starting rifling through someone's stuff for no reason.”
Billy handed over the warrant. The resident assistant glanced at it, then returned it. She said, “Alrighty, I guess we're square. Let me show you out. Okay?”
6
The footsteps sounded slow and heavy, almost ponderous, as the afternoon sun dipped below the horizon to give way to an early sunset. With the setting of the sun, temperatures dropped. The water that had gathered everywhere throughout the day began to freeze, creating thin patches of ice in some places, thick patches of ice in others. Frost appeared on the grass, and on the windshields of parked cars. The wind picked up, gusting up to forty miles an hour. The wind howled through the campus in a low, haunting moan as though spirits of the dead had risen for a time to cry out in anguish.
The man with the gun walked carefully, avoiding the ice as much as he could. When he couldn't avoid the ice, he slid his feet across it rather than walking normally. The first signs of a cold had appeared earlier in the day. His nose ran off and on. A soreness came to rest in the back of his throat. He knew that he had to stop spending so much time outside, particularly at night when the weather was the coldest. Yet, there had been no choice. He would just have to manage his symptoms as best he could.
Once he saw what he had to do, he had not hesitated to do it. It had been quick, even painless. The dead man had not suffered long. One minute, he was alive. The next, he was dead. The dead man had fallen over in the deep cold of the night, there to lie until he was discovered the next morning. It was supposed to have been sooner. Some brave soul was supposed to have been out walking in the middle of the night, either returning from a party or leaving for one. That no one had done so spoke to the shock that pervaded the university. No one ventured out, because no one wanted to have their face sprayed full of a blinding chemical agent by a policeman on the prowl.
Hours before that, and all the months leading up to the roof collapse, there had been another problem at the university. There had been a cancer lurking at the heart of the institution. It had begun silently, without warning, eating away at the foundation of the university. Left unchecked, it had touched everything and everyone involved at Shippensburg. The first one, the man had done because he'd had to. There had been no other choice. His hand had been forced.
He had thought about the second one for a long time. It would have been the first one had he gone through with it as soon as he was able. He watched and waited, biding his time. Sooner or later, he had thought, they would see the cancer for what it was. They cut it out at once and heal what could be healed. No one saw. Or, if they saw, they chose to remain silent. Nothing changed, except for the worst.
Then, the dam had finally burst. Not one but two tragedies had occurred. The man decided that the time had come for his plan to be set into motion. It was, as far as he was concerned, a simple plan. All it required was a silencer and a pair of gloves. When the semester had begun, he'd already had everything else he needed to do the job. Before departing, he had screwed the silencer on tight, then put on his leather gloves. The gun fit in the pouch of his sweatshirt which bore the red, white, and blue sailing ship that was the university's logo. He kept his hands in the pouch to keep the gun from falling out. Until, that was, he knocked on the door.
As he had expected, he was not granted entry at once. He was not a friend, nor even an acquaintance. He had not been expected. He had to ask permission to enter, a strange thing when he had entered the house so many times before in years past
. He was granted entrance. He did not wait long to pull out his gun. There could be no chance of the second one calling anyone, or crying for help. Shortly after the door closed behind him, he fired two shots directly at her back. Blood spurted out while she fell to the floor face-first, forced downward by the momentum of the bullets. He took a step forward, then fired another four shots into her back. She let out a gurgling moan while blood filled her lungs, suffocating her an inch at a time. He had wanted to make her suffer, and so he had. She had brought it on herself, after all. She used all her strength to turn over on to her back, which only caused the bleeding to increase. Her eyes widened then as she saw who he was. She had never expected it. No one did, and no one would.
He stood there and watched while the life drain out of her inch by inch. Her complexion grew pale. She began coughing up blood. Still he stood, impassive, not hearing her weak pleas for help. It was too late for help in any event. She would die for her arrogance, her hubris, her ineptitude, and her intransigence. She would die for taking a position for which she had not been prepared.
The man thought about firing a seventh bullet into her head to finish her off, but that would ruin the rule of six. He had to have six, for six was the most imperfect numeral. He only had to find a third one to have three sixes. Then, he would be satisfied.
The woman died gasping for breath, her body already cold, her face turned blue from suffocation, blood pooling out around her. The man left her there to be found by whoever would come. He tucked the silencer back into the pouch of his sweatshirt, then walked out of the house. He felt better, as he had never felt before. He felt alive. A wrong had been made right.
Only, there was one more to go. The man thought he knew whom he should make the third six. Someone, he decided, was too curious for their own good.
Chapter Six
1
Michael Ross and Billy McGee had eaten at a Japanese restaurant just outside of town on the long stretch of road that led from Shippensburg to Chambersburg. Michael had ordered a sushi platter and had insisted on paying. They both ate all of the sushi until the large tray, intended for four people, was empty. Then, they ordered another one, the leftovers of this one to be split between them. Both detectives knew that any food they left in the car would not go to waste, for temperature had never risen above thirty-six degrees.
They had spent time at the restaurant going over what they knew about the case thus far. It helped to verbalize what they knew and didn't know, what they could prove and what remained speculation. The process took them an hour as they went back and forth, picking out the smallest details about the case. Verbalizing also served to reinforce in their minds what had really happened; this often prevented long-term memory from distorting what short-term memory preserved perfectly, though temporarily.
By the time they had finished, the sun had set. They both decided to call it a night, since there was nothing more to do than to wait for Sunday morning to come. They drove back to the police station, there to part ways until the morning. They both agreed to meet up for breakfast at the diner down the road from the station so that they could plan their strategy for Sunday.
When Michael got home, he found that the heat, left on all day, had turned his trailer into a toasty oven. He laid his keys down on the kitchen counter with a sigh of relief, feeling the weariness that always came with going wherever the case led. A lot of it had been waiting around. Still more had been talking to people. He hoped that Sunday would be better. He wanted to find a break in the case, and soon.
The longer the case drew out, the more likely it would end up in the open unsolved unit to the detriment of both detectives’ careers. A cop killing never went unanswered. People were murdered every day of every week, every year. Many of them died because a killer had an impulse that had to be acted upon. Many of those killings went unsolved due to a lack of evidence, a lack of witnesses, or foul-ups by the police. A cop killing, however, was different. Every cop took to heart the death of one of their own, regardless of whether that cop was known to them or not. Policeman saw themselves as brothers in blue. The phrase “blue blood” had been thrown around the station more than once to signify a person who gave his heart and soul to the department, as opposed to someone born into fortunate circumstances. Strike against one of the brotherhood, strike against them all. That had always been the way of it, even before Michael had begun his career.
The strong feelings evoked by a cop killing also created a fanatical urgency on the part of commissioners, sheriffs, department heads, anyone and everyone with any amount of authority in a department. Michael felt that urgency himself. Someone was out there who did not believe that police officers served the public good. That notion went against everything Michael knew and understood. He had never been able to comprehend how anyone could shoot anyone else in anger. Each time he encountered a dead body shot to death or stabbed to death, he shut his emotions off until he could process it fully. He knew that he had done so with Kevin Bailey. Now that he had come home, everything came rolling in upon him in waves.
He sat down against the wall, his knees pressed against his chest. Once the first sobs escaped, he could not stop the others. The tears flowed as freely as if someone had turned on a faucet. A man's unique, irreplaceable life had been snuffed out. There would never be another Kevin Bailey. There would only be his remains, buried in the ground to rot away as the years passed and people forgot. It was the most heinous, most tragic crime he knew of. He shook as he sniffled and cried.
He got up to find a box of tissues. He settled instead for a handful of paper towels. He blew his nose, then grabbed another sheet to wipe off his face. He then remembered the sushi he had left in the car. That, at least, was something he could count as a positive.
2
He had always been a light sleeper. Both gunfire and silence in the middle of the night had robbed him forever of his ability to ignore the little noises nearby that his unconscious mind registered. He struggled his way out of sleep beneath two blankets in a warm bed. One of the three pillows he laid upon had slid its way out from underneath his head, through the headboard, and down to the floor where it lay a short distance away from the closet. He pulled the phone off his nightstand, and swiped a finger across it to unlock the screen. He read the time as 2:04 a.m. He dropped the phone to the floor and rolled over in bed. He closed his eyes, letting his mind drift away.
He was almost asleep when he heard a sound he could not identify. It was just at the edge of his hearing, a noise that might have come from a block down the street. Michael's eyes opened all the way. Awareness flooded back into his mind. He tried to place the sound, to determine if an animal had made it by scurrying along, or if the wind had dislodged something out of a tree. When he heard it a second time, he knew it for what it was: the sound of a foot depressing nearby grass. Someone was outside walking around very carefully.
He heard a crack of ice, then leaned over to pull out the Glock that he kept in his nightstand. He confirmed that it was loaded, then flipped the safety off. He rolled out of bed, putting his feet into his slippers. He walked over to his bedroom window. Moonlight filtered through the slits in his shades. He left them open just enough so that he could see outside if he needed, but closed so far that no one on the outside could see in. He saw a figure outside his window. On either side of the trailer was a door; the one nearest to his bedroom was the back door, for it faced away from the street.
Gradually, his eyes adjusted to the dark. He saw with even more clarity the man outside his home. The man took another step. This time, there was another crack of ice. The man froze in place for a long time while Michael waited, knowing that as long as he stayed in the trailer home, he had the advantage. As soon as he stepped out into the night, the man outside had the advantage. The presence of one might mean the presence of others.
He remembered that the average response time from the nearest police vehicle under normal road conditions was eight minutes. It would take fifteen
seconds to go back into his bedroom, then thirty seconds to make the call. Eight minutes and forty-five seconds. He wondered if he could last that long on his own.
Another step, and the man had almost cleared the window. Michael estimated that it would take another five steps for the man to reach the door. He ducked underneath the window and duck-walked to the door. By design, the door opened outward. He had locked it and secured the deadbolt as he always did. He listened and waited, his gun pointed towards the ceiling.
Each step seemed to take a minute. Then, the man arrived before the door. He stopped there for a moment, as if considering his next move. Michael heard a slight metallic rattling. The doorknob moved back and forth. The man outside had a lock picking kit and was attempting to pick his lock in the dark. To do so would require an external source of light—a flashlight.
Then, all at once, everything crashed together in his mind. All the puzzle pieces, previously put to the side for want of knowing where they went, came together to form a single, cohesive picture. He had been wasting his time investigating Shannon Moore, or any of the students from Shippensburg. A chill went down his back when he thought of who had really killed Kevin Bailey, and what the killer might do next.
While the man fiddled with the lock, Michael reached up with a tentative hand and slowly pulled the deadbolt away. He did so with meticulous care, making no sound. Once it was off and hanging loose, he stepped back from the door and held his gun out of front of him. The lock clicked open, and the door moved outward by inches. The man ascended three icy metal steps before he came into the trailer.
Michael called out, “Don't move! Drop your weapon!”
The man stopped in place, his gun pointed towards the floor. He let it fall with a heavy thud.
“Kick it over here.”
The man kicked the gun to Michael, who left it sit where it stopped beside his foot. He said, “I didn't expect to see you here, Chief Kenny.” When the man did not answer, Michael continued, “I was going after the wrong person. I might have gone down that path for days while you covered your tracks. Had you not come to my house tonight, I might never have figured out. I had to figure out who had a motive to kill me. I stay away from the Internet, you see. I don't do interviews. I'm almost never in the public eye. No one I testified against has been released from prison within the last six months. So that only leaves a police chief trying to protect his smuggling ring from being discovered. Kill me, and you shift the focus of the investigation entirely. More evidence to be gathered, more witnesses to be found, more and more of everything while you wrap up your business in the state here.”
