CrimeSeen2014.06.09

by Michaelbrent Collings

  “Geist, you read my report yet?” said Listings. The question came as most did from her: without preamble or salutation, as though everyone in the room should already be aware of her, and ready for whatever verbal grenades she might lob their way. Usually she was right in her assumption; she had the kind of presence that people tended to notice.

  This time, though, her larger-than-life persona failed her. Geist didn’t move his gaze so much as a millimeter. His pen kept racing. All he said was, “Huh?” He sounded dreamy, almost lost. Like he was not just deep in thought, but caught in the throes of some mind-altering experience.

  Evan frowned. Geist was a focused person, but this wasn’t like him. He would ignore you or tell you to get the hell out of the room and stop bothering him or he would talk to you. This distracted inability to attend to anything other than the television was weird. Not just weird, it was wrong. Geist was acting almost….

  Trapped.

  “Captain?” said Evan. He caught Listings’ eye and saw her face bunched in concern as well.

  Geist still didn’t look away from the scrambled screen, but he spoke again and sounded a bit more present this time. “You said you got this tape… where?”

  “Some cuckoo African voodoo place,” said Listings.

  “Vietnamese,” said Evan automatically.

  “Like it matters,” said Listings. Then, in a softer tone – one that, as far as Evan knew, his partner reserved only for him and for Geist – she said, “Captain? You find something?”

  Geist leaned another fraction of an inch closer to the screen. Any closer and he’d be touching it. “Everything,” he murmured. “It’s all in here.”

  Evan looked at Listings again. She shrugged. “Captain,” he said, “how long have you been watching this?”

  Geist didn’t answer. The moment stretched out for a long time, long enough that Evan was about to ask Listings to call the duty officer and ask who was the precinct commanding officer today so they could ask what to do if they had a semi-comatose captain on their hands, when Geist spoke again.

  “Over and over,” he said. “Just… it’s beautiful.” He finally looked away, staring at Evan with the single-minded intensity of a three-year-old struggling to convey something well beyond his vocabulary. “Beautiful,” he said again. “The tape loops. It loops.”

  Evan noticed that Geist, now turned almost halfway around to face him, was still writing on his pad. The motion couldn’t be comfortable, with his arm almost wrenched behind him. But the older man’s hand moved so fast it was a blur, and the skritch-skritch of the pen was a subtle scraping at the base of Evan’s mind.

  “Lots of security tapes do that, Captain,” Listings said. Then, in a tone that was even softer: “The tape’s messed up, sir. There’s nothing there.”

  Geist swiveled still farther to face Listings. Still writing.

  Skritch-skritch-skritch.

  “Everything’s there,” said Geist. No longer sounding like a child, but now like a zealot. A fanatic willing to kill or die for what he spoke of.

  It started to freak Evan out, and before he even thought about it he was reaching forward to turn off the monitor. He looked at the screen as he did, seeing those strange, twitchy lines, wondering what the captain was seeing in them. Wondering... but at the same time praying he never found out.

  “No!”

  Geist’s shout stopped Evan from moving. The captain stared at him for a second, then as soon as he saw Evan wasn’t going to turn off the monitor he turned back and repositioned himself in front of the screen.

  Staring at it.

  Still writing.

  Skritch-skritch-skritch.

  “Everything’s there,” he said. His voice was low, a monotone that sounded like all the emotion had been stripped from it. Evan had investigated a murder a few years ago in which a young couple had been murdered in front of their little boy. When Evan got there, the child – only about five years old, clutching a stuffed animal stained with his parents’ blood – had said, over and over, “It’s time for bed,” in the same voice Geist was using now. The same voice the captain spoke in when he said, “Everything’s there. If you watch enough.”

  Skritch-skritch.

  Evan looked at the dancing lines on the screen, and again felt himself drawn in. Felt himself on the verge of seeing something behind the distortion, the truth beneath the chaos. He felt like he was spinning in space, trying to orient on a fixed point in the never-ending twilight of the universe, but with no way to stop himself from turning, turning. Gravity had cut him loose.

  “Looks like it’s been tampered with,” said Listings.

  She was right. But as he watched, Evan realized that the captain was also right: there was a loop to the images. It was subtle, but the longer he watched the more he saw it. Just a subtle flicker as the screen reset, then played out its encoded secrets, then reset again, then again, and again….

  “Ooookay,” said Listings, and Evan could tell she was addressing the “You’re all acting nuts” tone of her voice to both him and the captain. She reached out and put a hand on the papers that Geist was writing on. “I’m just going to follow up on your research, okay?” she said.

  Geist didn’t answer. Evan wanted to believe it was because the captain was thinking, was on the verge of some breakthrough that would make everything come to light and restore sense to the world.

  But wanting to believe wasn’t the same as being able to.

  Listings pulled the papers out from under Geist’s hand.

  He didn’t seem to notice. He kept scribbling, drawing now on the table where the papers had sat. Thick, looping scrawls.

  Skritch-skritch-skritch.

  Listings handed Evan the papers. He managed to pull himself out of the bent lines of the monitor, out of the looping vision of pandemonium ad infinitum. He looked at the papers that Listings had given him.

  The sheets were covered in dark scrabbles and scribbles. Nonsense as thick and unremitting as that on the monitor that Geist was still rapturously watching. Every so often there was an actual letter on the papers, but even these seemed so random that they simply added to the disarray rather than implying any sense of underlying meaning. And the fact that all of it was inscribed in the angry scratches of a madman off his meds made it just that much more disconcerting.

  Evan looked at Geist. At his friend. “It’s all there,” said the captain. “It’s all there.”

  Evan couldn’t tell if he was talking about the papers or the tape that he was watching so obsessively. And didn’t know if it mattered.

  “Okay, Captain,” said Evan. “We’ll… we’ll check it out.”

  Geist nodded, but he was nodding at the monitor, and Evan couldn’t tell if the captain heard him or not. He looked at Listings. She was looking at him with, “What the hell is this?” plastered clearly across her features.

  Evan didn’t know.

  Message

  The bodies writhe.

  The woman is on the bottom. Evan’s wife, his wife.

  Her name is Val. Not short for Valentine, as so many assume, but rather it is the name of a goddess. She never lets him forget that. She laughs, and the sound is music. “Worship me,” she says, and he does.

  But now…

  He sees them, framed in the open doorway. A body on top, and he cannot see a face. The face is buried in his wife’s chest. Buried deep in her bosom, close to her heart. A place Evan thought reserved only for him.

  She looks up, perhaps alerted by the scrape of the door opening, the squeak of unoiled hinges. Perhaps it is the muffled sound of his breath, a gasp he cannot hide even as he covers his mouth with his hand.

  Maybe it is something else. Maybe she is attuned to this moment. Maybe she has been waiting.

  She does not look ashamed. She does not try to stop the man who is moaning against her.

  She smiles.

  She opens her mouth and speaks.

  “Hey, White, where are you?”


  …

  Evan stumbled. The room disappeared, replaced by open air. The carpeting under his feet was gone, and in its place was the cracked and craggy asphalt of the station parking lot.

  Listings was looking at him. “Where are you?” she said again, and he suspected that she already knew the answer. Listings knew about Val’s cheating, knew about that day.

  She had saved Evan from falling into himself, from completely dissolving in pain, especially given what happened after.

  But still, it wasn’t fair of him to put this on her. She was a good woman – a woman he had no doubt was better than Val had ever been. But that didn’t mean he had the right to put the sins of the past on her. To put his baggage on her shoulders, no matter how much she might be willing to bear it.

  He tried to bring himself back to the present. Bad enough that they were investigating something tied inextricably to the murder of his wife; he didn’t have to mope about finding her in bed with another man while walking with his partner, his –

  What do I even call Listings? Girlfriend? Lover? Geez, I suck at this.

  He realized he was musing again, lost in thought, and that he still hadn’t answered Listings’ question. He turned to her.

  And his foot caught in another rough patch on the asphalt.

  No surprise there, not in a place like Los Angeles, where infrastructure had deteriorated to the point that asphalt was more a theory than a physical reality, where it served more to hold together different potholes and crevices than to actually be a viable surface for smooth walking or driving.

  Still, Evan should have been paying better attention. As it was, his arms went up in that automatic reflex we are all born with, the hands pitching forward in a vain attempt to learn to fly at the last second.

  He was holding the papers that Geist had been writing on, and when he tripped the loose sheaf of scribbled sheets went flying. They flapped in the air like lame birds, most settling to the ground nearby but a few captured by errant gusts of wind and driven away.

  “Dammit!” shouted Listings. She sprinted after the papers, trusting Evan to right himself. Either that or deeming his inevitable fall a suiting punishment for being such a dumb-ass he couldn’t manage to walk and talk at the same time.

  Hard to tell with her sometimes.

  If it was the latter, then she’d be disappointed: Evan managed to stop himself from falling. His fingers skimmed the blacktop and he scraped the pad of his right index finger, but other than that he righted himself without injury.

  Listings was already leaning over to grab some of the papers before they spun away. “So the captain is bonkers and my partner’s a klutz,” she muttered through clearly-clenched teeth.

  She wasn’t mad. She was afraid.

  And then Evan was afraid, too. He grabbed her arm just before she picked up the paper she was reaching for.

  He thought for a moment that Listings was going to take a poke at him. She wheeled, her face bleached. People who don’t understand what is going on around them most often feel fear, and one of the chief ways humanity has always dealt with fear is through the masking effect of rage. “Hands off, White!”

  Evan backed off. He felt the blood rushing out of his face, though for a different reason. His hands went up, trying to placate and calm his partner. “Look,” he said, and pointed.

  The papers had been scattered when he fell. They had dropped in random piles on the ground, and pressed themselves against curbs, the wheels of a nearby cruiser, a parking meter.

  The captain had scrawled letters on the pages. Random letters between the scribbled nothings, letters placed accidentally, letters placed so aimlessly that chaos was their only common descriptor.

  Now, when Evan looked at the papers from left to right, the letters on the papers spelled something.

  “You see that, right?” he said. His voice was so quiet he didn’t know if it made it out of his mouth. Terror clutched his stomach, squeezing everything into his throat.

  “What…?” said Listings. For once she had no finish to her sentence.

  The letters spelled something.

  Not a word.

  A message.

  I’L KIL Evry 1 U LUv

  Lost

  Maximillian Geist had tried to be a good captain. A good cop. A good man.

  When he joined the force it was a different place, a place where you could be a part of the community in ways that were impossible now. The world had been swallowed up by bureaucracies, and how do you do community outreach when you are no longer a hand or a heart, but just a cog? No one understood how to speak to each other, they hid behind walls of legislation and ordinances and rules designed not to protect life, but to protect people from having to deal with life.

  But Geist kept on. He might be a cog, but he would at least try to be a good cog. His grandfather had been a cop, his father had been a cop. His father had died of complications following a gunshot wound he received when he walked into the middle of a robbery. He wasn’t even on duty at the time – just getting some ice cream for Geist’s mother during one of her late night “hank’rin’s,” as she called them.

  Hugo Geist entered an all-night convenience store, walked to the dairy section, and made it as far as the cash register with four different kinds of chocolate ice cream before the robber realized he was there and shot him three times in the chest. Geist’s father didn’t even take a step back. Nor did he drop the ice cream. He simply shifted hands – the store’s owner was emphatic about this point to the police and reporters – so that he could hold the ice cream with his other hand, leaving his right hand free to draw the service revolver he always carried with him.

  He shot the robber in the throat. The man bled out on the floor before the store owner could dial 911.

  Hugo Geist still didn’t fall. He put his gun back. Fumbled out a twenty-dollar bill. Told the owner what it was for.

  The ambulance came. They took Hugo away. The next morning his wife got a delivery from the store owner, who brought her the chocolate ice cream in the hospital. He explained that Hugo had wanted to pay for it, and made him promise to take the money needed to pay for it and then use the rest of the twenty as delivery costs to “get Mrs. Geist her ice cream because God knows I’ll never hear the end of it if I let a piffly little thing like bullets stop me from getting her her chocolate.”

  They cried together at Hugo’s bedside. He woke up, but was never the same. Infections came and went and he died six months later after losing his right arm, most of his intestinal tract, and all his will to live.

  But he was a cop to the end.

  That was the way Maximillian grew up: hearing stories of his daddy, the hero. Knowing he would one day be the same kind of man. The same kind of hero.

  And he had tried. He had tried… so… hard.

  But the bureaucracies. And the rules. And the gangs. And the million other things.

  And there was the one thing. That one thing. The one thing that Geist knew would always haunt him, would always stand between him and the dream he had of being not only a hero, but a genuinely good man.

  Maybe that was why he was so fascinated by this tape. Maybe that was why he was watching it, staring at it as the lines spun and whirled in front of him. He felt like it was dragging the memories out of him. Pulling him away from the pain, from the mistakes.

  It was also pulling him away from the good. From the joy. From all that made him who he was, and who he might one day become.

  He wondered if it was killing him.

  But even that thought seemed to be plucked from his mind by the strange, almost pulsating vision on the screen in front of him.

  I am empty.

  I have made no mistake.

  Not even the one mistake.

  Not even the one.

  Geist leaned in closer to the television screen. He was so close that he could feel the static of the screen pulling at the small hairs of his face – his eyebrows, the bit of stubble he’d accumulated. So
close that the screen fogged a bit with each breath.

  Almost close enough to rest against.

  What happens if I touch the screen?

  He didn’t do it.

  Not yet.

  Something clicked, and he realized that the lights in the already-dim A/V room had gone out. He couldn’t tell if someone else was in the room with him. He didn’t think so.

  He knew he should be concerned about that. The lights going out, but no one touching them? And it couldn’t be a fuse blowing, because the TV was still on.

  The tape was still playing.

  The tape.

  The… tape….

  Geist leaned just a fraction of an inch closer.

  The thoughts poured out of his mind.

  Partners

  Angela Listings was a woman with secrets.

  The thing about secrets, though, was that they invited discovery. No one ever bothered to read a mystery about a person who told everything to everyone. So sometimes Listings wondered if it might be better to simply share everything about her past with someone.

  Evan knew a lot of it. Knew almost all of it, in fact.

  But even he didn’t know everything. Even he didn’t know all her mysteries.

  Still, he knew a lot. And that was probably the only reason she was still here, stepping through a doorway that looked like someone had decorated it in Early Rainforest. She didn’t much care about the guy they were following – not the way he did, that was for sure.

  And that was odd for her. Because caring about the bad guy had been her guiding light, her central characteristic, for nearly all her life.

  When she was seven years old, Listings saw her first dead man. That dead man was the reason she hated criminals, but not the reason she was a cop. The second dead man was why she was a cop.

  The second dead man came into her house when she was asleep. Not dead yet, but so wired on speed that it had to be only a matter of time before his heart burst in his chest. Her father tried to stop him, but the drugs in the man’s body let him shrug off her father’s punches and kicks like they were nothing more than the flitting wings of a hummingbird.