Rose City Free Fall

by DL Barbur

  I stood in the doorway we'd just moved through, using it as cover. Mandy and Millan stacked up next to the first door on the right. Then they went in, leaving me to cover the hall.

  I gave them a couple of seconds to get into the room, then headed towards the doorway they'd just entered. I could stand there and I could cover the hall while still being close enough to help them out if something happened. I felt a drop of water land on the back of my neck. Must be some leaky pipes up there.

  Nobody ever looks up. I'd learned that lesson deer hunting in Tennessee, then relearned it in the Rangers.

  It was maybe six feet, on a diagonal, from where I was standing to the door Mandy and Millan had just entered. I took my first step and something tugged at my peripheral vision, some flickering of the light.

  Then a weight hit my shoulders, sending me crashing to the concrete. I landed on top of the shotgun’s receiver. Even though the vest, the impact was enough to drive the breath out of my lungs with a "whuff." I tried to roll over onto my back, but the weight settled on my shoulder blades and I felt an arm slide over my throat like an iron bar.

  I tried to drop my chin, so the pressure would be on my jaw and not my windpipe, but it was too late. I heaved and bucked to no avail as little black dots began to swim in my vision.

  Chapter Eleven

  As my lungs burned and my vision started to shut down, I gave it one last effort, whipsawing my body back and forth, trying to use my size and weight to my advantage, but my muscles were too oxygen-deprived, my attacker too well balanced, for me to get free. My attacker’s forearm was squeezing the carotid arteries in my neck, cutting off the blood supply to my brain.

  I remembered being taught to choke people out, remembered the instructor telling us that the onset of unconsciousness was swift, within six seconds or so, remembered him telling us you couldn't apply the choke for too long because brain damage and death were the inevitable outcomes.

  I thrashed around, trying to throw the guy off my back, but he was too good. He had his weight centered high up, right under my shoulder blades and his legs were spread wide, so I couldn't roll him off. All I could see was the dirty carpet of the hallway. My vision narrowed and it looked like I was looking through a soda straw. All I could hear was a singing whine in my ears. I tried to yell, tried to warn Mandy and Millan, but my mouth wouldn't move.

  Just as my vision was narrowing down to the last pinprick of light, I heard a wet thud and the weight came off my shoulders, just as abruptly as it landed.

  I sucked in a breath and rolled onto my side. I got my first look at Marshall. He was on the floor beside me, naked. His long brown hair was wet and plastered to his skull with sudsy water. A rivulet of blood ran from his hairline. Mandy raised her Glock to smack Marshall in the head again.

  I still couldn't move my arms and legs. It was a shame. The fear from getting choked out was being replaced by red animal rage. I wanted to get my hands on Marshall and pound his head through the wall until my arms got tired.

  Marshall jerked his head aside, so Mandy's blow just glanced off his ear. You couldn't properly pistol whip someone with a gun made out of plastic anyway. She kicked him under the ribs and holstered the gun. Then I heard a peculiar clacking, buzzing sound and Marshall jerked around like a cockroach on a frying pan.

  I finally managed to roll over onto my back. The Taser in Dan Millan’s hand was connected to the two metal barbs in Marshall's ass by long fine wires. A high, keening wail came out of Marshall's lips. I realized he’d been silent the whole time he’d been choking me.

  I fought my way to my knees. The Taser quit shocking Marshall and Millan yelled, "Put your hands behind your back!"

  Mandy pulled out her cuffs, but Marshall made a low growl in the back of his throat and tried to rise again. Millan shocked him again and Marshall fell flat.

  This time Mandy was ready. When the Taser quit, Mandy grabbed his arms and cuffed them together. Marshall lay on the carpet, panting but not saying anything.

  I managed to stand up. Every time I took a breath I felt a hitch of pain in my ribs from where I had fallen on the shotgun. I looked down at Marshall, then at Millan.

  "Nice shot," I said, nodding down at the barbs in Marshall's ass.

  "Target of opportunity," he said with a shrug.

  "You ok?" Mandy asked.

  "Yeah," I said. "He was choking me out until you showed up though. Nice job cracking him in the gourd."

  It was her turn to shrug. "Seemed like the thing to do at the time. Where the hell did he come from? The shower was still running in the bathroom. We saw wet footprints heading towards the door and figured he ran deeper into the building."

  I pointed up. "From up there. Must have been hanging from the pipes. Crazy."

  I craned my head back to look up, to see exactly where Marshall had been perched. Bad idea. The singing in my ears came back and my vision narrowed again. I felt myself wavering back and forth and decided to just sit down. I landed hard but it was better than falling over and landing on that damned shotgun again.

  I heard Millan get on the radio, calling up an ambulance.

  I didn't quite go all the way out, but I wavered on the verge of unconsciousness for what felt like a long time before things finally started to come back into focus.

  I tried to get up again.

  "Sit down, Dent," Millan said. He pulled the shotgun off me and handed it to Mandy. "You're going to the hospital."

  I wanted to argue with him, but I felt so weak and exhausted that I just sat there instead. Marshall lay there without saying a word the whole time, just stared at me with heavy-lidded eyes.

  The ambulance crew always seems to get there faster when they know it's a cop that is hurt.

  It turned out to not be so bad. After a few minutes of arguing, I managed to convince the ambulance crew to wrap an elastic bandage around my ribs and turn me loose. After a final admonition to go to the emergency room if I felt light-headed, dizzy or had trouble concentrating.

  Millan looked surprised when I stepped out of the back of the ambulance. "That didn't take long. Aren't you supposed to go home and get some rest?"

  "I'll rest when I'm dead. Let's go."

  Marshall's studio was bustling. While I’d been in the back of the ambulance getting poked and prodded, Mandy had called in the cavalry.

  Evidence techs were working in every room, searching, photographing and cataloging. If there was a remote possibility that something would be of evidentiary value, we would take it. I believed firmly that it was better to take two truckloads worth of stuff and not use most of it than figure out that we had to go back, get another warrant and seize something we'd left behind on the first visit. A good defense attorney would tear you up on stuff like that in court.

  Mandy was in the waiting room. Paperwork and a laptop computer were spread out on the counter in front of her. I hovered over her shoulder for a minute before she recognized me. She turned and jumped. She'd been wrapped up in the screen in front of her.

  "Dent! Hey. Are you ok?"

  I grunted an affirmative. "Where's Marshall?"

  "Downtown. We'll go interview him as soon as we're done here."

  "Did he get Mirandized?"

  Her mouth compressed into a line. I was being a jerk and I knew it the second it came out of my mouth. Even rookies didn't forget to Mirandize suspects these days, or at least if they did, they didn't last long.

  "Yeah, Dent. He got Mirandized." She turned back to the computer screen and went back to work on her evidence log.

  I sighed. "Look, I'm sorry. I'm being an asshole. You're doing a great job. I'm just a little bent out of shape over getting my head handed to me."

  She kept pecking at the keys for a minute, ignoring me. Finally, she stopped.

  "Yeah. You're right. You are being an asshole. But there's something you should see."

  She turned and walked back towards the hallway without another word, leaving me to follow or not as I liked. I shrugg
ed and fell in after her. My stomach did a little flip flop as we walked past the spot where Marshall had ambushed me. She led me to the first door on the left and stopped, making a little "after you" gesture.

  I stepped into the room. It had been turned into a miniature gym. The floors were covered with mats. A punching bag hung from one corner. Weights were scattered here and there. I walked over to a big bookcase along one wall. It was full of books on combatives and martial arts. One book on Brazilian Jujitsu fell open to a section on chokes when I opened it. I found a copy of Championship Fighting by Jack Dempsey, a personal favorite of mine, out of print and easily worth a few hundred bucks. There was some crazy stuff too, a book of ninja secrets of invisibility.

  Damn. A martial arts guy. I'd lost count of the number of guys I'd pounded into the ground who claimed to be martial arts experts. They claimed to have all sorts of exotic techniques, which I dealt with by hitting them really hard. Jack Dempsey really did have the right ideas.

  Still, I felt a little better. At least Marshall had been trained. I still wished I'd been able to pound on him a little bit. Intellectually, I knew Tasers were a good idea, but when a guy dropped out of the rafters and tried to choke you, it always felt good to leave the guy spitting out some teeth.

  “Any sign of a second guy? The other guy I saw in the van?”

  Mandy shook her head. “No sign. Marshall lives here alone. Only one toothbrush, the only clothes are his, no sign of anybody else.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  "That's not all," Mandy said from the doorway. "Come check this out."

  I followed her to the next room down the hall. Half of it was set up as a photography studio. A half-dozen lights on stands were set up around a bed in the center. Cameras on tripods were lined up on one wall. A couple of clothes racks stood in one corner, holding all sorts of lingerie in all different sizes.

  On the back wall, there were banks of computers. I counted three monitors and six computer towers. A young woman sat hunched in front of them, a laptop balanced on her lap with cords running from it to one of the computers in front of her.

  "How's it going, Casey?" Mandy asked.

  "We're almost there," she said, pushing a stray lock of blond hair out of her eye. It looked like somebody had trimmed her hair with a pair of dull pruning shears. I couldn’t tell if it was from neglect or one of those haircuts people spend a bunch of money on.

  Casey was in her late twenties, but she looked even younger. She was wearing a shapeless gray sweatshirt and jeans and looked like any one of the hipster kids I saw hanging out when I went downtown. It was hard to believe but she was a consultant for the bureau. She had helped us put half a dozen assholes in jail, mostly guys who were into kiddie porn. She was a little weird, in that way that hyper-intelligent people can sometimes seem to be on their own planet, but she had demonstrated a willingness to go after evidence like a rabid pit bull. She would stay awake for days at a time so she could help put some perv in jail. That made her a good troop in my book.

  I walked up and looked over her shoulder. The screen of the laptop was an incomprehensible mess of menus and command line boxes. I wasn't stupid and could puzzle my way through just about any piece of technology I put my mind to, but Casey was on a whole other level. This stuff changed incomprehensibly fast. Keeping up with it was a fulltime job that none of us had the time for. I hoped maybe someday the mayor would give her a medal, or at least a gift certificate to a decent hair stylist.

  She gave a little shake of her head and I heard bones pop and crackle in her neck. She shut down all the windows with a few keystrokes.

  "Ok,” Casey said. “I've got all the hard drives locked down so nothing can write to them. I'll take them back to the shop and start imaging them tonight. Is there anything you want right now?”

  "Are there any pictures?" I asked.

  She turned to look at me. Casey had big blue eyes that looked way too old for her face sometimes.

  "Dent, there's almost nothing but pictures on here. Thousands of them. He's serving them up on the Internet."

  This was going to be big. "Ok. Can you just show us the most recent ones?"

  She nodded, flipped on one of the monitors. It was huge, probably cost half a week of my salary. I watched as Casey opened up some folders. Lists of digital photographs spilled down the screen. She sorted them by date, opened the first few.

  There she was. Heather.

  "That's her," Mandy said. "Our victim."

  Casey opened about fifty photos, all of them timestamped from the night Heather was killed. She was clothed at first, then slowly undressed, never looking comfortable with what she was doing. I failed to see how anybody could find the pictures titillating. Maybe I was biased because I'd seen Heather dead and discarded like a worn out pair of shoes, but as I looked at the pictures I saw fear and vulnerability that removed any sexiness. To me, she looked like a scared young girl with her clothes off. But then again maybe that was the attraction for these guys.

  "Click on some more, just at random," Mandy said. More pictures popped up. Maybe a dozen other girls.

  "Jesus. They all look pretty young," Mandy said.

  "Yeah," I said. "Real young." I could feel the can of worms getting bigger. We'd have to do our best to identify each one of the girls, figure out how old they had been when the pictures were taken. I wondered how many of these girls would turn out to be dead. Then there were all the guys who had bought or downloaded the pictures. Certainly, they would be all over the country, probably all over the world. This would probably wind up going Federal.

  "We need to talk to Marshall," I said. "Soon. While he's still off balance from being arrested."

  Mandy nodded. "Yeah. Casey has the computer end sewn down. Paul and Tanner are helping with the evidence. What do you say we go sit down with Mr. Marshall and chat him up?"

  "Let's do it."

  I fidgeted in silence during the whole drive back to Central Precinct, forcing myself not to tell Mandy how I thought she should do the interrogation. It was her deal, and she would probably do fine. An ex-girlfriend had once called me a control freak.

  In the old days, our interview rooms used to have big one-way glass windows that looked like mirrors from the inside so we could stand there and observe interrogations. But all the TV cop shows ruined that for us. I'd always been amazed how much your average criminal was into TV cops shows. Some of them got angry when we didn't act like the guys on TV did. It was a weird world.

  Now we did interrogations in a plain square room with the walls painted an unnatural color somewhere between beige and pink that was calculated to put people into a warm, fuzzy cooperative mood. Bland, abstract art prints hung on the walls. It looked like a dentist office waiting room. The chairs for the interviewer and interviewee looked the same, but the one for the interviewer was slightly taller and infinitely more comfortable. Instead of the one-way mirror, we had hidden video cameras that covered the subject from three different angles and the place was wired for professional quality digital sound. Progress marches on.

  Mandy and I were in the next room over, watching Marshall on the monitors. He sat impassively still, dressed in disposable paper clothes.

  "What do you think?" I asked Mandy.

  She was quiet for a minute, standing there with her arms folded across her chest. "I'm wondering if we should have somebody else interview him. He tried to choke you to death and I'm the one who cracked him in the head with a pistol butt."

  I sat down in the hard plastic seat in front of all the recording gear, suddenly feeling very tired and very sore. She had a point. "It's up to you."

  She watched Marshall on the monitor for a moment. "I'll give it a shot. I think he's going to invoke anyway."

  "What makes you say that?" The smartest thing you could do if you got arrested was to invoke your Miranda rights. You didn't have to talk to anybody. Most of the people I'd put in jail had wound up there, directly or indirectly, because of things they said to
me.

  The Supreme Court said we had to tell people about their right to remain silent, but most suspects were too stupid to shut their mouths. They all thought they could talk their way out of the jam they were in, even ones that should have known better. After all, everybody was smarter than the cops. I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of people I'd arrested for major crimes who had been smart enough to invoke their Miranda rights.

  "I dunno," Mandy said. "He just seems like the kind of guy that would invoke.”

  "It's up to you,” I said again.

  Mandy nodded and walked out. I watched on the video screen as she walked in the interview room. She didn't say anything to Marshall at first. Instead, she busied herself with arranging her props: a thick file folder full of mostly blank paper, a videotape with "security footage" written on it and all sorts of evidence stickers, a couple of fingerprint cards sealed in a plastic bag. It was all fake. We never took real evidence into an interview with a suspect if we could help it. But it made them sit there and wonder what the hell you had on them.

  Finally, Mandy stopped futzing around and sat back in the chair. "Gibson, I'm Detective Williams. How are you?"

  Marshall was silent for a moment, then, instead of looking at Mandy, he looked directly into the lens of one of the video cameras, the one that was concealed in a big swirl of black in one of the paintings on the walls. He spoke very clearly and distinctly.

  "Detective Williams, I would like to exercise my rights not to speak with you until I have spoken with an attorney." It was the first time I'd heard him speak. His voice was soft, almost girlish.