Heroes Often Fail rcc-2

by Frank Zafiro

  Hart glanced at the news camera and swallowed in a gulp.

  “What’s the matter, officer?” The Bishop asked. “Nothing to say now that a little sunshine has been brought down upon your evil deeds?”

  “Evil…deeds?”

  “What else would you call stopping everything that’s black and moves? What else would you call interfering with the right of free travel by free men? What else — ”

  “A…little girl was kidnapped,” Hart stammered.

  “And I am truly sorrowful for that,” The Bishop intoned, “but that does not give you the cause to mercilessly infringe upon the rights-”

  “The suspect was black.”

  The Bishop grinned. “Officer, the suspect is always black. Don’t matter if he — ”

  Hart found his voice and raised it. “It’s Lieutenant,” he snapped. “And the suspect driving the van was black! We didn’t decide he was black. He was black.” He shook his head. “Jesus, it’s not like we’re targeting you people or something.”

  “What?” The Bishop asked. “What did you say to me?”

  Lieutenant Hart blinked. “I, ah, I said…”

  “Did you just say ‘you people?’”

  Hart glanced at the camera and back to The Bishop. “What I meant was…”

  Officer Will Reiser turned toward the Senior Volunteer who helped man the information desk, intending to ask her to go and get the Chief immediately. He’d have gone himself, but he had a feeling he’d need to stick around and keep Hart from getting lynched by the mob that was forming in the lobby.

  But when he looked to his right, the seat was empty.

  0728 hours

  “Anything to report?” Gio asked Katie.

  She shook her head sleepily and turned on the coffee maker. “Nope. No media vans in the front yard yet.”

  “They’re all down at the Public Safety Building.”

  “Press conference?”

  “Almost a riot, from what I heard. Bishop Hughes came to see the Chief and brought along a posse.”

  “What’d he want?”

  “Too many black guys getting stopped in vans last night,” Gio said.

  Katie gave him an incredulous look. “Wasn’t that the description? A black driver?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then who did he want us to stop? Eskimos?”

  Gio shrugged. Politics was politics and he didn’t like to even waste the time thinking about it.

  “Besides,” Katie said, “I thought he and the Chief were friends or something.”

  Gio shrugged again. “I think everything would’ve been fine, but when Will Reiser called for a lieutenant, it was Hart that was on duty. He stepped all over things and made a mess before the Senior Volunteer in the information booth had the sense to go get the Chief.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I called radio and asked Trisha.”

  Katie gave him a knowing look.

  Gio raised his hands defensively. “It’s not what you think, MacLeod…”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “No, it’s not. I just called her to find out what was going on in the lobby. They sent two units, then disregarded them.”

  “So if I asked you where you spent the night last night, the answer wouldn’t be at Trisha’s house?” Katie asked.

  “That’s right. I was not at Trisha’s house last night.”

  Katie eyed him for a moment, smiling. “You’re such a slut, Gio. If a girl acted the way you did…”

  Gio shrugged. “And if my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle.”

  Katie sighed with exasperation. “Well, at least then she wouldn’t have to worry about her reputation being sullied on the job.”

  Gio laughed. “What are you worried about, MacLeod? Your rep is secure.”

  “What rep is that?”

  “Lesbian.”

  Katie hit him on the shoulder. “The definition of a lesbian on River City PD is any woman who hasn’t slept with you.”

  “Exactly.”

  She shook her head. She thought about asking him about the few women on the department who really were lesbians, but was certain that he’d answer up with some platitude about how they were just waiting for the right man to turn them back, or at least make them bi-sexual. It was an idiotic sentiment she’d heard on several occasions.

  Gio swept the arm in the general direction of the rest of the house. “How’s the mother?”

  “In the living room, asleep on the couch. Hopefully, she’ll get some shut-eye. She needs it.”

  “Were there any phone calls?” Gio asked, meaning ransom calls.

  Katie shook her head no. “Just the husband. He’s still trying to catch flights back from the east coast.”

  “Any family come by?”

  “No. They don’t have a lot, I guess, and they’re spread out across the country. She said the woman whose daughter was with Amy came by yesterday.”

  “Jill,” Gio said. “She brought a casserole.”

  Katie nodded. “I ate a bowl last night. It was good. Onions were a little strong, though.”

  Gio and Katie stood in silence for a moment, each lost in their own thoughts. The sounds of the coffee maker hissing and gurgling filled the kitchen. He was thinking about Trisha the dispatcher. Katie was thinking about the lonely night Kathy Dugger had spent wrapped in her daughter’s blanket.

  Finally, Katie clapped Gio on the shoulder. “I’m going to go home and crash. I guess I’ll see you around eight or nine tonight.”

  “Okay.”

  Katie walked out the door and he locked it behind her. Then he returned to the kitchen and watched the glass coffee pot slowly fill up.

  0904 hours

  “What is that, oh-for-seventeen?” Tower asked Browning.

  “Why do you bother keeping track?” Browning said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then don’t.” Browning’s tone wasn’t sharp, but the rebuke hung there in the air between them.

  Tower shrugged. “Just keeping score, coach.”

  Browning didn’t reply. He pointed to Tower’s list.

  Tower drew a line through Marty Heath, who had been convicted of holding a little girl in his apartment for four hours against her will while doing all sorts of sordid things to her. They’d visited him at the apartment he’d taken since his release from prison last November. It looked like it was suspiciously close to the nearby elementary school. When Tower had commented on it, Marty quoted him the exact distance. It was forty feet beyond the statutory limit. The smug smile on Marty’s face settled into Tower’s stomach and burned.

  “Next up,” Tower told Browning, “is an oldie but a goodie. Francis Djurgarden.”

  Browning rolled his eyes. “He’s still alive?”

  “Apparently,” Tower said and rattled off the address. “I imagine it’s also about forty feet beyond the restricted zone that the law requires.”

  “Francis is an old hand,” Browning noted. He started the car and headed toward the address Tower had given him. “He’ll find a way to be within ten feet of the legal limit. But I thought he was back in Shelton.”

  “Last I heard, he was.” Tower shook his head. “If two falls don’t teach a guy a lesson, why do we even bother with any more? I mean, after that second fall, I think we ought to just go with the one-hundred-eight-six grain solution.”

  Browning allowed himself a small smile. The forty caliber round they carried on the River City Police Department measured one-hundred-eighty-six grains.

  “Why do we even bother after the first time with child molesters, anyway?” Tower continued. “It’s not like they’re curable or something. They never have been. Any of them who are honest will tell you that.”

  “True.”

  “Once they’re released, it’s not a matter of if they’ll re-offend, but when. And there’s no way we have the resources to watch over them well enough to stop them.”

  “You’re not superman?” Browning teased
lightly.

  “I just work the cases that come in. I don’t even keep track of these guys. That’s their probation officer’s job. And those poor mopes have about a hundred cases a piece.” Tower snorted. “It’s ridiculous.”

  Browning didn’t argue.

  Tower noticed that and asked, “You don’t care about this stuff?”

  “Course I do.”

  “You don’t look too concerned.”

  Browning glanced over at Tower, then back at the road. “How long you been on this job, John?”

  “I came on in ’83.”

  “So twelve years.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And how long have you been a detective?”

  Tower shrugged. “About three years, I guess. What’s that have to do with it?”

  Browning looked over at him again. “You’ve got some fire in your belly, John, and that’s great. But you have to control it or it will burn you up.”

  “So just don’t care?”

  “No, I didn’t say that. Just control the caring, that’s all.”

  The two men rode the rest of the way in silence. Tower thought about Marty Heath and the sour feeling the molester’s smug grin gave him in the pit of his gut.

  Browning changed the subject. “How’d Stephanie handle the overtime call?”

  Tower frowned. “She wasn’t happy. How about Veronica?”

  Browning shrugged. “She’s a cop’s wife,” he said and pulled to the curb a few houses away from Francis Djurgarden’s house.

  “Shall we?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Tower muttered. “Let’s go talk to sick bastard number eighteen.”

  1011 hours

  The jangling of the lock at the front door surprised Gio. He had been reading Cosmopolitan in the kitchen while Kathy Dugger watched television. He’d convinced her not to watch the news, but even the harmless sit-com was hard for her, he could tell. He supposed it was seeing the family on the show, with kids and parents together. But she sat there nonetheless, so Gio figured she was either going to tough it out or she wasn’t watching anything and was lost in her own thoughts.

  Either way, he left her alone.

  When the noise came from the front door, Gio started. He put down the magazine and strode out of the kitchen and to the entryway. He arrived just in time to see a man in his forties wearing a business suit step through the door.

  Surprise registered on the man’s face for a brief second. Then he saw Gio’s uniform and his mouth tightened.

  “Where’s my wife?” he demanded.

  Gio pointed toward the living room.

  The man stalked past him, brushing shoulders with Gio as he went by.

  Gio stood in the small entryway for a few seconds. Then he returned to the kitchen to wait. He knew men like Mr. Dugger. They were in positions of power in their career and they disliked the fact that the police might somehow have power over any part of their life. To compensate, they always strove to assert their civilian authority over the police officer, because, as they were swift to remind the officer, “my taxes pay your salary.”

  Knowing what he knew about men like Mr. Dugger, he also knew what was coming.

  Jesus, Gio, he thought to himself. Give the guy a break. His daughter’s been kidnapped.

  Gio took a deep breath and let it out.

  Their voices were subdued from the living room, though his arrival brought fresh sobbing from Kathy Dugger. He spent all of ten minutes with his wife before he came to the kitchen to talk to Gio.

  “I’m Peter Dugger,” he said, without offering his hand. “I’d like an update on the situation.”

  Gio said, “I can only tell you what I know, sir. My assignment is to be here in case there is a ransom call in your daughter’s case.”

  “You don’t receive updates from your commander?”

  “Not really,” Gio admitted. “I update him, not the other way around.”

  Peter Dugger grunted.

  Gio waited, knowing he was going to end up calling for a lieutenant.

  “Do you have any idea what the plan of action is that you people have put into effect?” Dugger’s voice was laced with condescension. “What are you doing to find my little girl?”

  “I’m sure they’re doing everything they possibly can,” Gio said.

  “But you don’t know.”

  Gio shook his head. “Let me ask you this, sir. Would you want them to stop their efforts just to update me?”

  Dugger cocked his head as if to sniff out the sarcasm in Gio’s voice. Gio waited, keeping his face neutral.

  Finally, Dugger leaned forward and whispered harshly, “I’ll tell you what I would want them to do. If they haven’t found my daughter, I goddamn well would want them to keep her parents informed of what was going on. Have you seen my wife in there? Do you see how stressed out she is? Did you hear her sobbing in the other room? Or are you too busy drinking my coffee and reading my wife’s fucking Cosmopolitan magazine?”

  Gio stared back at Dugger for a long moment. Then, he replied, “I thought she needed her space. That’s all.”

  Peter Dugger responded with a small snort.

  Gio reached for his portable radio. “Adam-257,” he said, “I need a supervisor to my location.”

  “Copy. Is this in regards to a Signal 8?”

  Signal 8 was the code for a telephone call. Gio realized that she was asking him if there had been a ransom call.

  “Negative,” he said. “The male half here has returned and would like an update on the case.”

  “Copy. I’ll notify L-143.”

  Gio copied the transmission and looked back at Peter Dugger. “A lieutenant will be en route to update you,” he said.

  Dugger nodded. “Fine. But he should’ve been here waiting for me. I don’t know what kind of outfit you guys are running-“

  “He’s on his way now, sir,” Gio said, overriding Dugger’s voice. “If you’d like to wait with your wife, I’ll let you know as soon as he arrives.”

  Dugger opened his mouth to argue, but decided not to for some reason.

  “I’ll be in the living room,” he said. “But I want to know the moment your boss arrives.”

  Gio nodded that he understood.

  Satisfied, Peter Dugger turned and stalked out of the room.

  1014 hours

  Captain Michael Reott sat behind a wall of paperwork which stood on top of his desk. He found most of it redundant and all of it dull. When Lieutenant Crawford entered his open office door without knocking, he pushed aside the stack he was working on with gratitude.

  “Good news?”

  Crawford shook his head and settled heavily into the chair opposite Reott.

  “Bad news?”

  “No news,” Crawford said. “None of the stops patrol made panned out to be anything. Browning and Tower struck out with almost twenty registered sex offenders. That Kopriva kid has been on the phone all day, but there’s been nothing.”

  Reott sighed. “Nothing except almost having a race riot in our lobby.”

  “Well, you can thank Hart for that,” Crawford said in disgust. “He’s the one that went out there and got that entire group of people riled up. Another coupla minutes and they woulda torn the lobby apart.”

  Reott shook his head. “Hart’s an idiot.”

  “He’s the reason our line troops have no faith in leadership,” Crawford said in agreement. “I swear to God, Mike, I’m not going back to patrol as a lieutenant. Not ever. Can you imagine having to follow up his act? It’d take a year to get the uniforms to have any respect for you.”

  Reott didn’t answer. Hart’s bumbling was second only to his ego.

  “What’s more,” Crawford said, “it took a seventy-year-old Senior Volunteer to have the sense to come out of the bathroom, see what was happening and go to the Chief’s office to get him out there to talk to the Bishop. She was smarter than the cops out there.”

  “Who was on the desk?”

  “Reiser.�
��

  Reott grunted. Reiser was a veteran cop. He’d should’ve known better. He changed the subject back to the kidnapping. “No hits on our teletype?”

  “None. It’ll be re-sent tomorrow, this time nationwide.”

  “No calls or letters to the victim’s house?”

  “Nope. Fact is, if there hasn’t been a ransom call yet, there isn’t going to be one.”

  Reott knew he was right. “You want to pull the officer from the house?”

  “It’s a waste of manpower at this point. Unless you want to pay for the P.R.”

  Reott shook his head. “No. Pull him.”

  “All right.”

  “What else?”

  “Nothing,” Crawford said. “I wish there was something.”

  Reott held up the newspaper. “At least we didn’t get filleted in today’s paper.”

  “That Pam Lincoln’s article?”

  Reott scanned the page for a byline. “Yeah.”

  Crawford nodded. “She’ll be fair. If we fuck up, she’ll say so. But she doesn’t go looking for mistakes that aren’t there.”

  “Unlike that Barlow guy.”

  “Barlow hates us.” Crawford shrugged. “What’re ya gonna do?”

  Reott dropped the paper onto his desk. “Anything outside of this case?”

  “The usual,” Crawford said. “I’ve got two detectives on the assault case where the three guys jumped the off-duty fireman outside of the Bayou Bluez. He took a pretty good thumping. Could’ve died, from what they tell me.”

  “How’s that looking?”

  “Like he had it coming, just not nearly as much as they…”

  Crawford was interrupted by a harsh buzzing on his belt. He grabbed his pager and looked at it. Then he looked up at Reott. “It’s Dispatch.”

  Reott gestured toward his telephone. Crawford dialed quickly and Carrie Anne picked up on the second ring.

  “Police Dispatch.”

  “Crawford here. You paged me?”

  “Yes. Adam-257, Officer Giovanni, is requesting you respond to his location as soon as possible.”

  Crawford’s eyebrows shot up. “He get a ransom call?”

  “No,” Carrie Anne said. “Apparently, the little girl’s father has returned home and wants an update on the investigation.”

  “Okay,” Crawford said and hung the phone.