Flight ik-8

by Jan Burke

  He had tried several times to call Irene to warn her about their guests and had ended up leaving a message on her voice mail at work.

  Back at his desk, he quickly sorted through the paperwork that had accumulated on it during the day. He was leaving to go down to the property room when Reed dared to speak to him.

  “Going to play hockey tomorrow night?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Frank said, thinking of his houseguests and all the work that lay before him.

  “You sick?” Reed asked. “You sound awful.”

  “Mild laryngitis. I’m fine.”

  “Our team doesn’t mean shit to him,” Vince said, and no one thought he was talking about hockey.

  “Vince…” Reed said in a warning tone.

  “I’ll be there if I can,” Frank said.

  “No, do what you want to do on your own,” Vince said. “Besides, you’re a lousy fucking defenseman. We won’t miss you.”

  It was true, Frank thought. He’d only been playing a year.

  “Make up your mind, Vince,” Pete said. “Is he fucking up all your beautiful teamwork or can you manage defense all by yourself?”

  “What’s with you?” Vince said, obviously feeling betrayed.

  Pete glanced at Frank, then said, “Nothing. Lieutenant’s been chewing my ass out. But what’s new with that? I swear, if I’m ever killed by a bomb, just go looking through the rubble for an ass. If the bite marks on it match Carlson’s dental records, it’s mine!”

  The others laughed, but Vince said, “Jesus, Baird, what the hell are you dreaming up? Who’d want to look for you, let alone hunt for your ass?”

  “I see you eyeing it all the time, Vince. In fact, from now on, I’m putting my hockey gear on at home.”

  Frank shook his head and made his way out of the room as Vince did his best to recover lost yardage. Frank figured that after fifteen years of this kind of exchange, Vince should have realized that he didn’t stand a chance. If they stayed true to form, they would ridicule each other unmercifully for another twenty minutes or so.

  He revised this thought — not unmercifully, really. If the subject was sexual prowess, stature, physique, hair loss, or nationality, virtually no insult was forbidden. But there were certain taboos. While Pete’s first wife was fair game, Rachel was not. Neither was Vince’s current — and fifth — wife, Amie. Vince’s kids were never the subject of a joke Vince didn’t make himself. Three of Vince’s four ex-wives could be joked about, but not his second one, Lisa, the one who had spent the last twelve years in a psych ward. Lisa was totally off-limits.

  Lisa was so seldom mentioned, Frank had almost forgotten her. If he remembered the story correctly, Vince had married her on the rebound, shortly after the breakup of his first marriage. This second marriage had lasted only a few weeks. Rumor said that she was a cop groupie and had bedded a couple of other members of the department — he’d heard varying stories as to whether this occurred before or after they split up. But she ultimately found life on the other side of the law more exciting — or so she told Vince on one of the many occasions when he had bailed her out. She began using drugs and soon was living on the streets. Among the uniforms, she earned the nickname “Old Faithful,” not because she was either, but because any time you saw her, you could be certain of being able to make an arrest — she never failed to have illicit drugs on her person.

  Pete had told Frank that Vince — against his own better judgment and experience — had tried to save her from herself again and again. She only got into deeper trouble. She ended up involved with a man who took her along with him to a bank one day — five people, including four members of one family, were dead by the time they left. Witnesses said she didn’t seem to be an accomplice so much as a shocked onlooker. She had covered her ears and screamed “Stop!” when the shooting began.

  Her partner escaped, leaving her behind, so Old Faithful was still good for an arrest. When she was taken into custody, she was questioned about her role, but she didn’t say a word. She wasn’t, as was first believed, exercising her right to remain silent — in the dozen or so years since the robbery, she hadn’t said a word to anyone. Vince put a second mortgage on his house to pay for a good attorney for her, and the court found her to be incompetent to stand trial.

  Again Frank considered the financial burdens Vince had faced at the time of the Randolph murders. And reaching his destination, the property room, Frank wondered if Vince’s ex had spent time there. Ten years ago, the current property room had been the city’s women’s jail, and the property room had been in the basement.

  Now women who were arrested were kept at the LPPD only very briefly, in holding cells downstairs, until they could be transported to a nearby county facility.

  No attempt had been made to hide the signs of the current property room’s past. Although bigger and brighter than the underground area it used to occupy, this wasn’t exactly a cheerful setting. At the moment, on one side of the blue bars of case-hardened steel, a uniformed officer was arguing loudly with property room workers about a problem with his paperwork. On the other side of the counter, behind the network of bars, the two women who were working the desk almost appeared to be incarcerated — and seemed to be enjoying the experience about as much.

  As he drew closer to the counter, passing under the watchful eye of several surveillance cameras, Frank saw that Flynn, the sergeant who was in charge of the area, had put a new sign over the front desk: Evidence Control. He remembered that Flynn was trying to get everybody to leave off calling it the property room and to start calling it by this new name. He wished Flynn luck. It would be easier to teach an elephant to figure-skate.

  The sign looked as if it had been printed by a computer and laminated at a local copy shop. Probably at Flynn’s own expense.

  Frank didn’t envy Flynn. The guy was under a lot of pressure and never got a hell of a lot of support. He had to ride almost everybody to get them to follow procedures, and that created a certain level of resentment. Controlling guns, drugs, money, and valuables such as jewelry — against thieves both inside and outside the department — presented constant challenges in security. Legal requirements for keeping and controlling evidence were complex and ever-changing. Less than five percent of the items held in evidence would ever be used in court. All the same, defense lawyers knew that evidence control was often where a police department was most vulnerable — one sloppy entry in chain-of-custody paperwork could blow a case apart.

  Frank shook his head. Given its importance, you would have thought Flynn would get whatever he asked for. But only someone who didn’t understand the politics of law enforcement would have supposed such a thing. The chief knew that city hall and the voters were happiest when they saw lots of black-and-whites on the streets, so by the time patrol cars and rookies were paid for, there wasn’t a hell of a lot left for paying for detectives, electronic equipment, and crime labs — and there sure as hell wasn’t much allotted to Flynn’s area.

  Which was why Flynn, a veteran of twenty years on the force, most of them on the city’s toughest streets, now spent his days in an abandoned women’s jail. Pete sometimes razzed Flynn by calling him a sailor dying of thirst, a reference both to Flynn’s naval career and to the fact that Flynn guarded all sorts of valuables while his own budget got cut again and again. Frank figured it was more like being a minimum-wage teller in a big bank. You could handle a million dollars, but none of it was yours — and let a dime of it go missing, you were the one who had to come up with the answers.

  Frank looked in at the oddball assortment of desks and filing cabinets behind the front counter. Flynn, a former naval supply officer, was a master at obtaining equipment on the cheap. He watched the newspaper for notices of businesses closing facilities or going belly-up, and then contacted their owners begging for desks and office equipment.

  The area still smelled like a lockup, a mix of disinfectant, insecticide, and all the ripened scents on possessions taken
from the people who were in custody. Unlike the clean and healthy specimens of humanity who got hauled into jail on Dragnet, in real life a lot of the people who got arrested weren’t in such fine condition. A drunken man arrested for assault, for example, might piss in his own pants and follow that up by puking all over himself — if you were lucky, he did this after he was out of the patrol car. When such folks exchanged their garments for jailhouse garb, Flynn and his workers were required to keep their personal property safe for a certain period of time, or until it was claimed by them.

  Flynn stepped out of his office now, his scowl enough to quiet the protesting officer.

  “Tell you what,” Flynn said to the patrolman. “You know so damned much more than any of us, I’m going to ask your boss to transfer you down here so we can all benefit from your enlightenment.”

  He received a hasty apology from the horrified officer, who quickly walked away.

  “Harriman!” Flynn said, seeing Frank. “How’s it going?”

  “Fine,” he said. “How about for you, Flynn?”

  “What the hell happened to your voice?”

  “Mild laryngitis.”

  Flynn studied him for a brief moment, then said, “Glad you decided to humor me and come down here to check out that new freezer. Big improvement over the old one.” He pushed a sign-in sheet on a clipboard toward Frank. “Save your voice, just sign in and I’ll take you back to see it.”

  Frank managed not to show surprise. He smiled and nodded as if thanking Flynn for being so considerate, signed the sheet, and waited while Flynn unlocked the gate into the office area.

  “All the monitors working?” Flynn asked the women. When they said yes, he said, “Then you know how to find me if you need me.”

  Frank wondered if this was Flynn’s way of reminding him that there were surveillance cameras throughout the area.

  He followed Flynn past another set of clerks doing computer work. Most of them, he knew, were getting ready to leave for the day. As they went through the next room, he saw a worker engaged in disposing of some unclaimed personal effects. Although it was warm in the room, she wore coveralls, a mask, safety glasses, long gloves, and a scarf tied over her hair.

  They walked down the concrete corridor, past a long row of cells with open doors.

  “How many cells in here?” Frank asked.

  “About fifty-five,” Flynn said. “We’ve rearranged it some, but not much. At least they gave me another place to put the bicycles. Twelve hundred stolen bicycles a year. You think the guy who designed these cells was thinking, ‘Gee, I better leave room for twelve hundred bicycles’?”

  The former cells were converted to hold evidence and other property under police control. Where once women inmates were held, there were now bags, boxes, and bins of evidence, and bunks had been converted into wide shelves. Each bag or box was sealed with red tape; some were also sealed by the lab’s blue tape. Affixed to one corner of each of the containers was a computer-printed tag with an evidence number, case number, booking and citation numbers.

  Wondering if the Randolph evidence had been tracked by computer, Frank asked, “When did they stop using a manual system to keep track of all of this?”

  “Nineteen eighty-three,” Flynn said. “I don’t even like to think about what it was like back then.”

  “You’ve been in charge for what, four years now?”

  “Yes. I came in here, there were no video cameras, you could have a single individual working the desk, you had unescorted personnel wandering back through here, no motion detectors — a damned mess. You want to know something crazy?”

  “What?”

  “I made most of my improvements based on the suggestions of a dead man. Trent Randolph.”

  Frank stopped walking.

  “Come on, we’ve got to put on a nice show here. Our voices aren’t being recorded, thank the baby Jesus in his diapers, but they’ll be watching.”

  “They don’t trust their boss?” Frank asked as they passed an area holding televisions, radios, and stereo equipment.

  “You’re the hot topic of gossip in the department these days,” Flynn said, taking out another set of keys and unlocking a door to another hallway. They passed cells containing weapons. The cells were locked.

  “Tell me about Randolph’s suggestions. Did you know him?”

  “No, not really. But he wrote this set of papers for the commission about how screwed up things were around here when it came to evidence. Guess it caused a hell of an uproar among the brass at the time. You know, here he was a newcomer, and the first of these papers says, ‘Hey, fellas, your department is HUA when it comes to evidence control.’”

  While Frank doubted that Randolph literally reported that the LPPD had its “head up its ass,” he could imagine how unwelcome any civilian newcomer’s criticism would be.

  “You weren’t in charge here until long after Randolph was killed,” Frank said. “How did you see this report?”

  Flynn smiled and said, “I had the good fortune of taking over from a guy who wasn’t organized and who never threw anything away.” He paused and opened another door. “Don’t slip here in front of the ding cells. The floor is wet. We had plumbing problems thanks to those assholes upstairs. Next week we’ll see an end to that.”

  The “ding cells” — Flynn’s old-fashioned slang for a cell where an inmate was kept if she was “dingy” — were the former isolation lockups, solid-steel cells with tiny, thick-plate viewing ports, now used to hold low-value drugs. The plumbing leak had been caused when the inmates of the men’s jail on the floor above had pulled an equally old-fashioned prisoners’ trick — stuffing blankets down the jail’s toilets for the amusement of seeing the chaos it could cause when the plumbing backed up. The department was about to install what amounted to a gigantic garbage disposal to chew up the blankets before they clogged the lines.

  “You were telling me about finding Randolph’s report,” Frank said as they continued on.

  “Yeah — well, I vaguely remembered something about it from when Randolph was alive. Chief Hale was pissed as hell about it, but Randolph had been his ally on some other matters, so he was in a tough spot. Plus, Randolph was tight with this old geezer on the newspaper, and nobody wanted that kind of trouble.” He paused. “Sorry — forgot about your wife.”

  They were walking near shelves filled with small boxes. Frank thought his pager went off, but when he checked it, there was no new message. He heard the sound again. He looked up to see Flynn smiling. “We keep all the beepers and cell phones in this section. Listen.”

  Within seconds, another pager sounded and then another, first from one unseen but nearby location and then from another. Soon, it seemed as if they were surrounded by them. It was as if they had entered a forest full of strange crickets that chirped only one or two at a time.

  Flynn laughed. “All the damned drug dealers’ customers, still trying to get ahold of them.”

  Frank smiled. “Just think — in the course of a day, you’re hearing thousands in lost sales.”

  “They’ll find someone else to buy from, but I’m happy to know that the previous owners of these things are missing out. Anyway, I was telling you about this report. So, I didn’t remember all of this history at first, just that there had been some big brouhaha. But that was enough to make me decide not to mention to anybody about where I’m getting all these notions for improvements. And I know Trent Randolph is long dead, so he isn’t likely to speak up and tell everyone I stole his ideas. But then I guess my conscience starts to bother me, so I go to Hale, and that’s when he tells me that Randolph was his friend and it’s great that I have this report and did I find any others.”

  “Others?”

  “I guess Randolph had the fire of a reformer — you know, he had ideas about everything. All excited about applying scientific principles to the way we do business around here. But I only found the one report.”

  They entered a room that held several la
rge safes, including one for cash and others for the most valuable drugs. Two large walk-in freezers stood nearby, one with a rosary on it. The homicide freezer.

  “You didn’t want to tell me about Randolph in front of your staff?” Frank asked.

  “Oh, hell, no — I don’t care — they don’t even know who Randolph was. Seeing you made me think of him, because I’ve heard you caught the cases. And the Lefebvre case, too, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s why we’re down here, my boy. ’Cause something damned strange is going on, and you should know about it.”

  29

  Wednesday, July 12, 5:01 P.M.

  Las Piernas Police Department

  “First we gotta put on a show. Let’s step into the new freezer for half a second.”

  Flynn unlocked it and Frank followed him in. Blood samples and other biological materials were already neatly organized within. Just before Frank began to feel unbearably cold, Flynn led him back out again. Flynn gestured to a large metal desk, one that looked as if he had found it on one of his scavenger hunts for equipment. “Let’s sit over here. You can angle away from the camera, and for now I’d just as soon do that.”

  “Okay.”

  Flynn unrolled what looked like a blueprint for the freezer and put it near the top of the desk. He said, “Point at that damned thing once in a while. Anybody asks, I wanted your opinion about organizing the freezer.”

  Next he pulled out some photocopies and slid one of them over to Frank. He kept a few others to himself, facedown. Indicating the one Frank had, he said, “What you have there is a copy of an evidence-control log sheet — a sign-out sheet for the most recent date on which the Randolph murder evidence — or I should say, the box that once contained the evidence — has been checked out of here.”

  “Flynn — hold on. I just walked down here. How could you know—”

  “I’ve been wanting to talk to you since Monday, but for reasons I’ll get to, I couldn’t let you know that. I didn’t know when you would finally be moseying along and finding your way here, but I know you. I knew you’d look at the evidence yourself sooner or later. When I checked on the surveillance cameras out near the front desk and saw your mug in the frame, I figured, ‘Yes, there is a God.’”