by Dave Daren
“No,” I argued as I dropped the chair back onto all four legs. “You can’t do that. Chet had a deal with me.”
“Sorry,” Durant replied. “This case is full of dead ends, and everything all points to one man. You’re a great lawyer, Henry, but a shitty investigator. And that’s fine. Stick to what you’re good at.”
“I’ve found a lot of loose ends,” I protested with a frown, “and I had until the close of business today.”
“Yeah,” he sighed, “I know. But you’ve got nothing solid, from what we can tell. I mean, I followed your advice and had our officers sitting around listening to some God awful synthesizer gibberish, and some guy rambling on about Luke Skywalker. Geez, Henry. I’m all for intuition, but you’ve got to be reasonable here. These are trained professionals. I need my men out in the field.”
“Trained professionals?” I scoffed. “Your officers double time it by working shifts at Best Buy, and have on three, not one but three, separate occasions erroneously charged suspects with a capital offense. Now, why are you so reluctant to actually do police work?”
“I don’t take kindly to your implication,” Durant snapped, and I could tell I’d gotten under his skin with that last comment.
“I wasn’t implying anything,” I retorted. “I’m just asking a simple question.”
“The order came from above, Henry,” Durant yelled. “You don’t like it, go over my head, asshole.”
“I will,” I responded firmly, “and believe me, you won’t like it.”
Durant hung up on me, and I shook my head. This was the second time I had been hung up on in two days.
Then I called Chet.
“Hey, Chet,” I said once he picked up. “It’s Henry Irving.”
“Hello, Henry,” Chet replied in a distant tone.
I got right to the point. “I heard the investigation on the Steele case has been halted.”
“That’s right,” he sighed. “We appreciate your help, Mr. Irving, but the city needs to do its job and properly move cases through the justice system. We welcome your defense of your client once the charges have been processed.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” I demanded as I jabbed my index finger into the table before me. “We had a deal.”
“I asked if you would assist the investigators based on some past foibles,” he said, “but it is clear this time the investigation was done properly. So, the--”
“No,” I cut him off. “You gave me until the end of the week--”
“It is the end of the week,” he interrupted me this time, “and again, we do appreciate the work you’ve done--”
“Cut the formal bullshit, Chet,” I retorted. “This isn’t a fucking press release. I could make a call, and you’d be on the other end of a professional investigation so fast your head would spin.”
“Alright,” Chet said. “You want me to cut the bullshit? You’ve got fifteen of Sedona’s law enforcement officers sitting in an office listening to endless hours of eight track tapes of … a fifty year old Star Wars nerd geeking it out with his Casio. We’ve only got twenty eight officers in the whole city! And this is your best lead, so far as I can tell. Look, you’ve made some good calls in the past. And I commend you for that. Really, I do. I think you deserve some kind of honor or medal or something. We’ll look into that. But you’re wrong on this one. Sometimes SPD does do its job properly.”
“Sometimes,” I pointed out sharply, “and when you’re talking about a capital offense, that needs to be all the time.”
“I get we’ve made some mistakes,” Chet growled, “and the city cannot apologize enough for those. I know we really fouled it up with your sister, and again I can’t apologize enough. But that doesn’t mean we don’t know what we’re doing.”
“Actually,” I laughed, “it does. I’ve got some leads, and if I prove you wrong, I’m going to launch a Federal civil rights investigation against all of SPD. I’ll drag you, Durant, and the whole lot of you into court. And right or wrong, you don’t want that bullshit.”
There was a long moment of silence on the other end of the line, and for a second I thought I’d been hung up on for the third time.
Then Chet sighed. “What kind of leads do you have?”
Got him.
“They’re not solid,” I replied quickly. “I need more time.”
“How much more time?” he asked.
“Forty eight hours,” I answered.
“Alright,” he muttered. “I’ll give you forty eight hours. After that, I’m charging him.”
“Fine,” I agreed, “but I want the cops going through those tapes. I want them making spreadsheets, running the audio through foreign language apps, taking notes. We need to know why this guy wanted these tapes in a safe. This is a murder investigation! It needs to look like one.”
“I’ll give it to you for forty eight more hours,” Chet sighed.
“Thank you,” I replied.
“But this better come up with something,” he grumbled.
“It will,” I promised before I ended the call.
When I got off the phone, I rubbed my face with my hands and exhaled sharply. Then I went to check on Vicki in the conference room, who had her head buried on the table listening to more Casio nonsense.
“The cops halted the investigation,” I reported.
“What?” She popped her head up. “I thought we had until the end of the day.”
“We did,” I sighed. “They jumped the gun and filed the paperwork to charge Alfred.”
“Seriously?” She scowled. “We’ve got so much … ”
“I know,” I mumbled as I dragged my hands through my hair, “I told Chet that. He gave us forty eight hours. But we’re going to need to produce something by then.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do,” she said decidedly before she looked around the room at the boxes. A small file box with a “Done” sticker sat in one corner. It looked like it held about a dozen tapes. The rest of the table was full of unopened cases.
“We need more help,” I muttered.
“We could get plenty of help,” Vicki mused with a furrowed brow, “but how many eight track players are there in Sedona?”
I smiled and pulled out my phone. “If there are eight track players in this town, I can find them. After all, I am Moondust Irving’s kid.”
She laughed, and I got my dad after a couple of rings.
“Hey, dad,” I said as a broad grin stretched across my face, “I could use a favor.”
Chapter 16
It wasn’t long before the conference room in our office turned into an all out makeshift recording studio. I counted about twenty of my dad’s friends, gray haired hippie burnouts, lugging all sorts of audio gadgetry in through our doors.
Moondust Irving stood at the doorway and directed people.
“Yeah, back through there,” he said to a happy go lucky but not so bright guy with a silver headed ponytail. The guy carried some kind of hefty audio something on his shoulder.
“All we needed were eight track players,” I replied.
“Yeah,” my dad nodded, “we’ve got equipment that will translate the audio to other formats, so we can play and listen to it on other devices. Because, even between all of these guys, we still couldn’t find more than a couple eight track players.”
“I see,” I murmured with a frown.
“Eight tracks,” my dad clicked his tongue, “it was such an awful format between records and cassettes. Even at the time I never understood it. It was like the cassette’s redheaded stepchild. Ugh. Why did this guy do eight tracks?”
“Because he’s an idiot,” I chuckled dryly.
“I would venture to say so,” my dad laughed. “I’d never even heard of Jerry Steele.”
This was a condemning statement. My dad knew every decent musician in the county. In terms of music, if he didn’t know someone, it meant they weren’t worth knowing.
While the guys set up listening equi
pment, Vicki flittered around handing out NDA’s.
“Cool man,” the not so bright hippie said, “NSA? Like, you’re with the government? So, do you know about Area 51?”
“No,” Vicki smiled, “NDA.”
“Oh.” He started to nod but then stopped and frown. “Is that like the NSA?”
“No,” Vicki replied slowly as she tried to smother her laughter. “It’s a non-disclosure agreement. It means you won’t talk to anyone about what you find out here.”
“Okay sooo … what are we finding out?” he asked as he tilted his head to the side. “About aliens?”
I groaned and made a note not to put him on listening duty.
My dad noticed and chuckled. “That’s Lon,” he said. “He’s a nice guy. Just, you know.”
He mimed a joint smoking motion.
“Yeah,” I winked, “you should take note.”
“Whatever are you talking about, counselor?” he joked.
“Uh-huh,” I snickered. “Just stick to your salsa. I went by the McGrath’s today.”
“That Perry’s something else,” he shuddered, “creeps me out, really. He kept staring at me like … ugh. Weird.”
I smirked. “He thinks I’m a chip off the old block, and it’s freaking him out.”
“Really?” My dad made a face and looked me up and down quizzically. “Hmmm.”
“That’s what I said,” I chuckled.
“It’s the nose,” he replied as he squinted at my face. “You have my nose.”
“Ah,” I nodded, “that explains it.”
The next hour or so included a significant amount of finagling, while the two dozen or so guys knocked around through our offices. They borrowed every outlet strip we had and blew the breakers at one point.
“This is some shitty wiring.” Lon shook his head as he peered over our circuit box.
“We just had it redone a couple of months ago,” I said with a frown.
“Who did it?” he asked and scrunched up his face. “They didn’t know what they were doing. Look, you’ve got these wires that should be over here, not over there. I’ll bet it was those idiots at Central.”
“Yeah,” I mused, “come to think of it that was who we used.”
He groaned. “Those guys don’t know what they’re doing. You shouldn’t have used them. They should be shut down. Look, let me show you.”
He pulled out a pair of wire clippers from his pocket. Why he had wire clippers in his pocket, I will never know.
“No, no, no.” I shook my head rapidly as I reached out to stop him. “That’s fine, Lon.”
“You should listen to Lon,” my dad chimed in from behind me. “He was a master electrician.”
“Really?” I asked as I blinked in surprise at the man beside me.
“Yeah.” Lon nodded. “You know, I paid my dues back in the day with the city. I installed half of the wiring in this town. Then, you know, I got fried.”
My eyes went wide. “You got … fried?” I repeated.
He shrugged. “That’s what they say. I was installing the wiring at the new McDonald’s, well it’s the old McDonald’s now. But, anyway, they were remodeling, and I don’t know, all the sudden I just felt this wicked fire buzzing through my veins. And the next thing I remember, I was in the hospital, and it was two days later, and they told me I got fried.”
“Jesus,” I breathed.
He smiled and nodded slowly. “It was wicked, man. Never had a high like that before. Gotta big settlement so I don’t have to work, which is good because I don’t remember so good anymore. But people think it’s cause of the weed. Maybe it is. But also because I got fried.”
“Well,” I said as I took the wire clippers out of his hand, “no one’s getting fried today.” Then I pulled some cash out of my pocket. “Would you run to the store and get us another surge protector?”
Lon nodded. “Yeah. That will do it, too.”
After Lon disappeared out the door, my dad smirked. “Good call, son.”
“Yeah,” I laughed and flipped the breaker back on, “I thought so.”
Then I followed my dad back into the conference room, which had become a hub of activity, and I noticed someone had knocked a hole in the wall.
“What happened here?” I muttered as I fingered the ruptured sheetrock.
“Oh, yeah,” a tall lanky man said as he unwound wires, “I hit that with my amp. Sorry, man.”
“This is Steve,” my dad jumped in before I could reply, and he shot me a death look that conveyed Steve must be someone of importance.
Steve turned and smiled at me. He was about my dad’s age, with wavy brown hair down to the middle of his back, and jeans and a plaid shirt, as if his style stopped in 1995.
“Sorry, I’ll fix your wall, man,” he apologized.
My dad laughed too loudly. “It’s alright, Steve. Henry’s just glad to have your help.”
“Yeah, no worries,” I muttered and eyed my dad.
Steve smiled and continued setting up. Then my dad turned and leaned toward me.
“Steve is the best audio engineer in Arizona,” he whispered. “He works for all of the recording studios, and one time even worked with Nickelback. He books out for like two years in advance. It’s unbelievable we caught him today.”
Suddenly, I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye, and I turned to see Vicki was in a corner with the tapes.
“What are you doing?” I asked as I walked over to her.
“I’m trying to get these into a system to where we can have multiple users,” she replied. “I think your dad had in mind headphones.”
“Yeah,” my dad overheard, “everyone will have headphones, and we can have … how many listening stations, Steve?”
“Ten,” Steve answered as he messed around with cables.
“Ten listening stations?” I repeated and instantly forgave Steve for his hole in the wall. “We’ve only had one. That’s incredible!”
“What’s up with the eight tracks, though?” Steve asked as he made a face. “That was the worst format in the history of audio recording. Terrible.”
“That’s what I said,” my dad chuckled.
Just then, Lon arrived with the surge protector and handed it to Steve, who I realized was in charge of the audio room. He presented it to Steve on his palm with all the reverence of a subject presenting a gift to their king. Steve took the offering and thanked him appropriately, and Lon scampered off, having accomplished his mission.
A few minutes later. AJ arrived from her sanity coffee break, stood at the door to the conference room, and just stared.
“What the … ” she finally muttered as her wide eyes continued to sweep the room.
I laughed. “They’re going to help us. They’re creating ten listening stations so we can go through the tapes faster.”
AJ shook her head as she regained her composure and then grinned. “I’m down for that.”
“I knew you would be.” I smiled. “If you can compile some guidelines for what they need to look for, and how you’re cataloging things, it would help.”
“Sure,” she replied. Then she set down her coffee and created charts and lists on the whiteboard while the guys finished setting up.
While the chaos continued in the conference room, I decided to check on some of the other leads. Since we had gotten nowhere on the Wright Way-Morales connection, I decided to kick it into full gear.
AJ had already found a number for Olliver Morales’ wife, Julie, and programmed it into our Outlook, so I called him. I got a voicemail on the first try, so I went back to my desk and ran a background check.
Morales had lived in Phoenix, but he was originally from Sedona. He should have friends and connections here somewhere.
And according to the background check, Julie Morales was known to have an address in Sedona as late as three months ago.
“Ping,” I muttered to myself and wrote down the address. Then I turned around in my chair and raised my voice
. “Hey, Vic?”
“Yeah?” she asked as she came over to lean in the doorframe of the conference room.
“I’m going to see if I can find Julie Morales, Olliver’s wife,” I said. “You got all this?”
“Julie Morales?” someone repeated, and I peeked around Vicki to follow the voice. The speaker was a small, wiry Hispanic man, wearing baggy pants and a baggy shirt.
“You know her?” I asked and raised a brow.
“Yeah,” he nodded, “she’s my sister.”
My eyes went wide. “Really?” I breathed.
What luck.
“Yup,” he replied with a shrug. “She just moved back from Phoenix.”
“Because of what happened?” I asked as I faced him more fully.
He nodded again. “She’s pretty broken up, you know.”
“I’ll bet,” I murmured as I stroked my chin. “Do you have any ideas that might lead us to where she might be?”
“No,” he shook his head, “I don’t have any ideas. I know exactly where she is, because I dropped her off before I came here.”
My heart skipped a beat, and I leaned forward excitedly. “Where is that?”
“Why do you want to know?” he asked as he narrowed his eyes at me.
“We think the murder we’re investigating is connected to what happened with Olliver,” I explained. “We just want to talk to her.”
“Well, then I know she will want to talk,” he sighed. “She’s got a lot to say about that. She’s at her son’s art show at the new Horizons school.”
“Horizons, huh?” I snickered.
That was the non-traditional school Harmony taught at.
“Yeah,” he laughed. “They don’t have classes there. I don’t know what kind of school that is. My sister’s weird.”
“Mine too,” I chuckled and held out my hand to him. “Thanks for the help. What’s your name?”
“Alex,” he answered as he walked over to shake my hand. “Alex Badillo.”
“Thanks, Alex,” I smiled, “I appreciate it.”
“No,” he replied, “I’m the one who appreciates it. My sister’s pretty broke up. If the murders are connected, it would really help her to know.”
