The Third Eye

by Jenna Rae

  The room’s furniture and floor were littered with clothes and trash. On the bathroom counter and the low dresser sat the predictable detritus left behind by a fugitive: sundries, antacids, coins, a pocketknife, breath mints, extra ammunition, and snack food. He had two key rings, both jammed with dozens of keys, multiple vehicle fobs, and several unnamed items. She made a note to follow up on what those items were and what exactly the keys and fobs opened.

  In the motel Dumpster nearest his room, Yolo County investigators found a notebook detailing his extortion activities and victims, including not only several small businesses but a host of pimps, prostitutes, and drug dealers. All victims were identified by name, location, occupation, and scheduled pickups.

  In the same Dumpster, investigators also found his old clothes and the packaging from his hair dye and tanning spray. He tested positive for marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamines and a mélange of prescription antidepressants and painkillers. In his stomach were the remains of two burgers, snack cakes, and antacids.

  The other three burgers and a bag of potato chips sat unopened on the nightstand alongside a second bottle of antacids. She thought about that. If he’d been planning to eat five burgers, why were three still sitting there? Would a suicidal man buy a bunch of food, hair dye, and tanning spray? Why bother with a disguise if he was going to kill himself? Had he changed his mind, become too anxious to continue?

  Why buy two bottles of antacids? She wanted to check the receipt from the superstore. Maybe he’d already had one bottle, almost empty, and he’d bought a second for when that one ran out. Maybe there was a sale on antacids that made buying two bottles just too tempting a deal to pass up, and a lifetime’s frugality had kicked in. Either way, it was odd behavior for a man planning to kill himself.

  Maybe in his last minutes or hours he’d learned something that caused him to panic or lose hope. Had he felt guilty? He surely hadn’t planned on Sheraton’s presence in the alley. Maybe the guilt caught up with him. Maybe he started to panic as his cash reserves ran to what he considered low.

  While nine thousand dollars was a lot of money, it was hardly a nest egg. Maybe Donnelly’s real nest egg ended up beyond his reach somehow. Maybe his co-conspirators left him in the wind. She rubbed her forehead, trying to figure out why he’d made the choices he did.

  Certainly, his escape path didn’t seem well planned. He drove out of town, looping south toward San Francisco and then northeast toward the central valley. He stopped after eighty miles. Then after a single night in Fairfield, he took a whole day to show up a mere twelve miles east in Vacaville.

  Where was he that day? Was he waiting for someone or had he already connected with a co-conspirator? Why bother moving only one medium-sized city farther east? The long gap between his sighting in Vacaville and his appearance in West Sacramento intrigued her. Where was he? Was he with someone?

  He’d spent three days going only a hundred and twenty miles. Within those three days he could have traveled several states away from Sheraton’s murder. He could have gone to Mexico. Even going the same distance toward San Francisco would have been a smarter choice—he could have blended in with the crowds of Oakland or Berkeley, San Francisco or San Jose, and been rendered almost invisible. Instead, he went to the relatively small city of West Sacramento.

  The report noted the presence of an abrasion ring under his chin. The abrasion ring was described as “presumptively” having been left by his service weapon. She was surprised there were no pictures and no measurements. There was no support documentation. Her experience with Yolo County had led her to expect an extremely detailed, carefully accurate report. This report was none of those things.

  She examined the possibilities with care. Had Yolo County’s normally meticulous detectives glossed over the uglier details because Donnelly was both a cop and a cop’s killer? It wasn’t hard to imagine even the best officer falling under the shadow of such difficult conflicts. She wrote herself a lengthy message detailing how to conduct the needed follow-up without making the Yolo County investigators defensive.

  A single bullet was positively identified as having come from Donnelly’s service weapon—though the report included no evidentiary support or reference thereto. The bullet entered his mouth through the lower jaw, traveled upward and blew out a section of the top of his skull. There was no notation to indicate the recovery location of the pieces of his skull.

  His prints were the only ones on the weapon and the bullet. He was right-handed, and the report specified that the angles of entry and exit were consistent with a self-inflected gunshot by a right-handed victim of his height seated on the edge of the bed. There were no other injuries noted.

  She closed the thin file with a sigh, knowing she didn’t have enough information to develop any meaningful insight. Yolo County’s reports did not draw definitive conclusions about Donnelly’s death. It could have been a murder or a suicide.

  She couldn’t shake the notion that someone had murdered Sergeant Mark Donnelly. Someone soaked his phone and laptop. Someone either staged a suicide or somehow compelled him to kill himself. She considered this possibility carefully. Under what circumstances could someone convince a cop—one brazen enough to extort money from small businesses and murder a nosy rookie—to kill himself?

  “Am I just too invested in thinking the guy wasn’t doing this on his own?” She again rolled her head from side to side, feeling and hearing the cracks and snaps this caused.

  She made another note to herself: get video footage from the outside of his last motel, the one he died in.

  She examined her to-do list and sighed. She had a lot of unanswered questions. One question in particular dogged her as she sat staring at her pages of notes: who was at Donnelly’s door in the hours before his death?

  Chapter Four

  When she was still solving crimes instead of attending meetings and badgering people about paperwork, Brenda often imagined she wanted to commit whatever crime she was investigating. She would develop detailed plans for how to do so and choose the safest and most effective one.

  If evidence suggested the perpetrator’s plan was very different from her own, she tried to imagine why they might have chosen that methodology instead of one of the more obviously efficacious ones.

  It was the seemingly illogical choices in the commission of and attempts to get away with a crime that often served to help identify the perpetrators. Sometimes it was odd little quirks or habits that tripped up criminals too, she recalled with a shake of her head.

  A few years back, Peterson and Brenda stood watching grainy, black-and-white video footage of an armed robbery, one of a series in various neighborhoods in south Briarwood. Because the robber was becoming more violent and abusive toward store personnel with each robbery, the cases were kicked over to their unit.

  Peterson was grousing over the pettiness of the crime—usually they worked murders and higher-profile cases—and complaining about the poor quality of the cameras in the all-night convenience stores. As usual, she ignored his muttered commentary and squinted at the screen.

  She noticed the robber repeatedly pushing up his balaclava and pulling a great wad of tissues from the left front pocket of his jeans. Each time, he blew his nose, pulled the mask back down and continued to menace the store clerk.

  She went back over the video from prior robberies and noticed an escalation in the perpetrator’s sinus problem. She idly wondered if the escalation in violence correlated more closely with the increase in his congestion or his building confidence as he continued to commit robberies without getting caught.

  Guessing the robber had allergies, she scouted local drugstores for customers buying decongestants that contained pseudoephedrine, the purchase of which in California requires the presentation and recording of identification.

  Despite their years of successful investigative collaboration, Peterson thought her theorizing a waste of time, especially since the recovery of records for such purchases req
uired tedious paperwork and negotiation in the name of interagency cooperation. Then they had to look through hundreds of hours of footage to find the man who’d cased each store by purchasing decongestants in the week before each robbery.

  It wasn’t until her theorizing worked and the nose-blowing robber was identified, investigated, arrested and convicted that Peterson grudgingly acknowledged the fruitfulness of her line of inquiry.

  “Not bad,” he’d said with a grudging smile, “for a girl.”

  Both of them got better at the job and worse at life—a cop’s inverse proportion of happiness—working seventy-hour weeks and ruining both his marriage and her relationship with Tori. But as absent as they’d been with their respective romantic partners, they’d become increasingly effective as an investigative team.

  Now all of that was in the past. Brenda was a paper pusher and Peterson a binge-drinking retiree who haunted cop bars and, it seemed, disappeared at the first sign of potential fuss.

  She shook her head out of the past. She imagined she was Sergeant Mark Donnelly. She pictured herself extorting money from small-business owners and low-level criminals, keeping careful track of the schedule and amounts in a small notebook. She wouldn’t trust an electronic tracking system to be impermeable. She imagined feeling secretive and gleeful, powerful and frightened at the same time.

  She paced the room, trying to walk like Donnelly, think like Donnelly. He’d had what she thought of as a skunk walk, hips forward and head back a little, like there wasn’t anything that could touch him. It was bravado, of course, but her Donnelly self didn’t realize that, not consciously.

  She found the posture as she paced, slowing down and tipping up her chin. She pulled her center of gravity up, stiffened her hips, swung her shoulders with each step. She held her arms slightly out from her sides as if to suggest she had massive muscles that made this necessary. She puffed up her chest and breathed in self-satisfaction.

  She saw herself as Sergeant Donnelly, strolling into the liquor store and smirking at the wary foreigner behind the counter, knowing that the store owner was afraid and would hand over the money quickly. She saw herself as the corrupt cop, opening the bag and pretending to count the bills and probably swiping a candy bar or beef jerky or whatever, just to remind the counterman of how powerless he was to stop the extortion and the thievery.

  As Donnelly she gloated over the power as much as over the money, the way bullies everywhere do. And like most bullies, her Donnelly self was covering for overwhelming fear and insecurity.

  She saw her Donnelly self panic and shoot Sheraton, feeling she had no choice. Shooting Sheraton was not something she’d wanted to do. As Donnelly, she had to give up the extortion game and her life as a sergeant and her home and everything she valued except whatever money she’d managed to squirrel away. The hard part about escaping into the ether was losing the people in your real life. As Donnelly, who would she love? Who would she not want to give up? Donnelly had two girlfriends. Did he want to take one of the women with him? As Donnelly, involved in a high-risk criminal endeavor, she’d have avoided developing significant personal relationships. She would want to be able to extract from her life relatively painlessly.

  Somehow Sheraton ended up in the alley. Her Donnelly self panicked and shot her. So what would she do? She would gather as much cash as possible and flee the country. She would have long before set up an escape route and a backup plan or two or three. There was no way she’d have left herself vulnerable to capture and prosecution in the event of discovery. She’d have slid down the rabbit hole within thirty minutes of shooting Sheraton, and she would have never again set foot in the United States or in any of its extradition partners.

  But Donnelly didn’t do that. He spent days drifting slowly eastward across Northern California, casually heading from Briarwood to West Sacramento, staying in no-tell motels and eating junk food. Why? She asked the question of herself though she already knew the answer: he had a partner or a boss, someone he answered to or was counting on for something. He was waiting for help or instructions from something or someone.

  If she were Donnelly, hanging around, she would be desperate to contact that someone. What if they hung her out to dry? Would she go after them? What if they came after her? Until the night before his death, Donnelly hadn’t acted like a man on the run, and he hadn’t acted like a man hiding from a co-conspirator. He hadn’t seemed afraid until somewhere between Vacaville and West Sacramento.

  Brenda wondered about a few things. If his cohort or cohorts lived and worked in Briarwood, why did he flee to West Sacramento? Why, if he’d decided to kill himself, did he bother to hide his notebook and disguise tools, and so half-hartedly?

  If she had been on the run, she’d have burned the notebook, wiped the tech and her chargers clean, smashed the hard drives and flushed the crumbs of them away. She wouldn’t have counted on water to destroy the laptop and cell phone. Both were in a lab somewhere near Sacramento, being dried out so information could be harvested from them.

  She’d have covered her tracks. She’d have been a lot more careful than Donnelly. She certainly wouldn’t have driven her own car or shopped at a store near a CHP administrative office. She wouldn’t have used her service weapon to kill herself or another cop. She would have tried harder to get away.

  Any thinking person would come up with a plan for discovery. She didn’t know Donnelly well, but he had managed to garner decent performance reviews and a promotion to sergeant in his five years on the force. Both his lieutenant and his captain thought well of him. So what were the odds he’d failed to even consider the possibility of things going awry? He’d almost certainly had some kind of plan.

  Did his plan fall apart, or did he not prepare some escape hatch for himself? Why didn’t he bug out to the Sierras, where only hours away from Briarwood loomed huge mountains of largely unpopulated forest?

  Why didn’t he just go to Mexico? He was proficient in Spanish and had wads of cash. Briarwood was a port. If Brenda had been running some criminal venture, she’d have had a boat at the marina and would have sailed to Mexico while the world chased her on land. But she’d checked, and he didn’t have a boat. If he had a partner, she wondered, did the partner have a boat? If so, why didn’t he use it?

  He was dating two different blondes: one an exotic dancer at a bar down the street from The Hole, and the other a lingerie saleswoman at the mall. Both were in their twenties and well over a decade younger than he was. He’d taken dozens of selfies with both women, and Brenda scrolled through his social media pages, noting that entries only covered the previous year or so. Big smiles, big breasts, big hair. Lots of cleavage and spangles surrounded smug, self-satisfied Donnelly in photo after photo.

  She considered the few interactions they’d had. He hadn’t seemed like either an idiot or a genius. He’d seemed a little immature but decently competent. She’d never picked up on any criminal component to his personality. If anything, she’d thought of him as a plodder whose greatest skill was filling out forms. She’d dismissed him as part of what Peterson called the new breed of police officer, too myopic and too willing to be micromanaged to ever become what her old partner had referred to as real cops. She admitted to herself that she’d shared some of his disdain for guys like Donnelly, officers who were good at doing what they were told but lacked the intellectual rigor and bandwidth to really think through a problem logically.

  Donnelly’s shooting Sheraton must have been a knee-jerk reaction, like that of a kid lying to cover up some minor infraction. It was less an indication of his capacity for crime than of panic. Brenda couldn’t imagine Donnelly taking the initiative to shake down a score of small-business owners, not only organizing the necessary muscle to intimidate them but keeping the whole thing going, even after being assigned a curious, wide-eyed rookie to train.

  She decided to operate for the time being as though she knew he’d been working for someone. But for whom? And was he the only cop this the
oretical crime boss had been running? That seemed doubtful. The big boss was willing and able to run one or more shakedown rings, involve at least one cop, then murder a cop, all while managing to completely cover his tracks.

  She examined the behavior of every cop she’d encountered since Sheraton’s death. No one stood out. Not one of her fellow officers had been shifty or nervous or off. They’d all behaved exactly the way she’d have expected them to. Of course, if Donnelly’s big boss was in the department, he’d managed to fool every officer in the city.

  If she were a dirty cop running other dirty cops, she’d stay out of her own house. While it would be more convenient to run a crime ring using officers under her command, it would be safer to use officers nobody would connect to her.

  How would she do it, logistically? Burner phones, obviously, and a coded communication system. She’d only use a couple of people she really trusted and keep them in the dark about each other as much as possible. She’d do as the larger crimes rings did: assign a lieutenant to manage each crew and keep them apart. Isolated cells were harder to track back to their capos. She’d discourage them from doing all the things Donnelly had done: keeping an account of the extortion, living high on social media, even having two girlfriends. Spurned lovers and those who formed the pointy ends of love triangles were great sources of actionable evidence in many criminal cases.

  As the boss of the crime ring, she’d have kept a tight leash on Donnelly, and she’d have done everything in her power to keep him from letting a rookie trainee discover his nefarious deeds. With enough juice, she’d have ensured he never got a rookie trainee.