The Pursuit of Justice

We arranged for her to come into the office in a day or so, once she had time to contact a funeral home, which she'd need once we released the body after the automatic autopsy., Then we'd do a more in-depth interview, when we had more specific things to ask her about. Once we established the sequence of events to come with her, we again offered our condolences, and then took our leave.

Miranda dropped me by my car and we both headed home, to reconvene the next day at work.

I got in slightly after four am, I was beat and Clarice was still asleep, snoring very gently. I clambered back into the warm bed as quietly as I could, and I was away to the land of nod myself, almost instantly.

The next day, I didn't get into the office till almost noon. Hey, I'd been up till four interviewing people for a murder. I'm entitled to take a bit of time. As it was, I still beat Miranda in by about ten minutes.

I busied myself doing all the usual things - firing off a request for a credit report, asking the DMV for driving records, looking up our victim in the police and FBI databases, all the normal data gathering you do at the start of an investigation. The report from the autopsy and forensics wouldn't show up until later in the afternoon, but there was plenty to do in the meantime.

When Miranda showed up, I asked her to tidy up the remains of one of the investigations we were already embroiled in: a mechanic had turned up dead, in a lake, and it was evidently foul-play. We'd traced it back to a meth lab we were eighty-five percent sure he was involved in and had spent the earlier part of the previous day staking it out, from information we'd dug up about a possible pick up, but to no avail. No one came near it. I'd taken off at three when it became clear no one was going to show up as we'd been told, got some essential chores out of the way and made it home for dinner before Clarice, for once. I'd even picked up some of her favorite Chinese food. I'm all made of care, ladies.

However, we couldn't just drop the other case, but now we had this one to deal with first, and it was worth spending at least a couple of days on it while it was fresh. The other one wasn't going anywhere, so there was no pressing need to be on it.

Eventually, around three, the autopsy came in, and I read that, while Miranda read the forensic report, and once we were each done, we switched. There wasn't that much we didn't know in either one already. He'd died of head trauma, via a close range .45 bullet. No great revelation there. I had been right in my assumption, and the place was clean. Clinically clean. Either Newton was a neat freak, or our perp was a part time cleaner. No fingerprints on any of the major surfaces, not even on the door, which meant it had been wiped off. That suggested the perp was probably not wearing gloves. No sign of forced entry, so Newton knew or trusted his assailant. No sign of a struggle. No DNA traces the forensic guys could find, no fibers anywhere, no dirty footprints, no disturbances in the blood spats, to indicate someone had blocked the spray with their body. Not much of anything, really. Apart from a very dead body, with the most open mind it's possible to get.

I just knew this wasn't going to be an easy case to solve, and the look in Miranda's eyes was the same.

The only ray of light we had at all was that Newton's phone had been found by the body, and, wonder of wonders, it was not locked down. Phones these days seem to have more defenses than Fort Knox: fingerprint scanners, facial recognition, personal codes etc. It's only a matter of time before they need to smell your farts, to know it's you. Newton's phone was, refreshingly, free of all that. Oh, it had it all, it was just turned off, which was our first piece of luck, or piece of suspicious providence, depending on how you wanted to look at it. Miranda looked at it as us "being given a chance" -- although who was giving us this chance the jury was still out on. I had my own opinions, but hey, why shit on her day?

Once we'd read the reports, we dug out the phone. Yeah, we can actually open those phones, even though they are evidence. No point in treating it like gold and not being able to get to what's on it, right? The case might be blown open with what's on a phone these days. You've gotta use every opportunity that comes your way, no question. So yeah, we went through his phone, even though that's pretty much digging into the underwear drawer of life.

There wasn't much interesting to begin with. Those people who salivate at the idea of peering into the deep and dark corners of other's lives will usually be the first to tell you that often, there's not that much to see. Some racist comments, usually well disguised. Judgement of others, irrational fears, petty anger. It's all there. Newton wasn't alone in that. He wasn't that fond of his two children, he wished his wife was more into sex, and he had a case of anal sex fascination. While all that was there, there wasn't that much background to his life. Most of it was local color to who he was, not what he was.

There wasn't a calendar of appointments. There weren't any juicy text threads to an illicit girlfriend; in fact, most of the texts he received were from people inquiring of a professional nature. He just didn't seem to have many friends. Hell, half his contacts started "Mister X" or "Miss Y", which tells you a lot about how he related to people. From a distance, it would seem. Most disappointing of all, there wasn't a nice handy email saying, "Hey, by the way, I'm showing up to kill you this evening, please be at work, signed, The Murderer." That would have helped a lot.

The one thing the tech guys did draw our attention to was a history of Uber trips that Newton had taken recently. That was interesting, because he had a car. He'd go to the office, then use an Uber to go across town, then come back, and he did it fairly regularly. That suggested all sorts of possibilities: a lover, a drug habit, some place he had to go where he didn't want people to see his vehicle, and I must admit that both Miranda and my own interest was piqued.

We looked up the address - google maps, bless you, quite a theme here - and found it was another accountant. Man, this guy really needed to get out more.

Our stiff was visiting another accountant, one Ashton Polk. We did a preliminary dive on this guy, basic website, looked like he was more into blue chip and hedge fund managers kind of work. Bit more upmarket. Well, it was now five-thirty, and I was still tired from the night before, so we called it a day. We'd go visit tomorrow, see what we could scare up.

I went home and had dinner with Clarice. Ahh, Clarice. My rock. Almost twenty years married, she'd married me just after I got out of the academy. I was a late arrival to the force; I didn't even apply till I was thirty. Before then, I'd been, of all things, a merchant seaman. Ran away from home to sea. I mean, in Minneapolis, we have our own version of "going to see the elephant," and it involves the high seas and exotic ports. At least that's what lured me out there.

I could have joined the Navy, but, well, let's just say that by age eighteen, I was well aware of my own reticence at taking orders without asking why, or, indeed, respecting anyone at all.

The merchant marines seemed more my speed. I could come and go as I pleased, see the world, learn about it, and hell, experience it. Or more accurately, the women. And the booze. And god knows what else. I did it all. How my dick never fell off, I've no idea. How I escaped syphilis, gonorrhea, AIDS, all of it, I'll never know. I must have some guardian angel up there is all I can figure, and by god, he had his hands full. Or she did. Can't be sexist these days. I know that for a fact, since I've had three "gender affirmation" seminars I've had to attend just this year.

Anyway, there are other things you learn when you are on a merchant ship, such as being able to handle your own problems. People don't get it; you are on a ship out in the middle of the ocean, and if things turn pear shaped with a shipmate, there's no cop out there to report him to. You have to deal with the situation there and then. You have to figure out how to not antagonize people who are easily upset, and be tough enough to cope if you do. Sure, there are laws, but like most laws, there's only a speed limit when there is a cop around to enforce it.

That went for policing our own, too. I'd been a party to an... intervention, shall we say, for one crewman from Columbia, who we discovered had "bought" a cabin boy in Hong Kong. We literally only discovered it when someone heard this boy crying in this guy's room. Technically, it was smuggling, but no one even knew of this boy's existence, and the state he was in; a ten-year-old, beaten, abused, with no hope in his eyes. Mateo got off on his tears and cries.

Well, we didn't tell the captain. We just arranged for Mateo to "have an accident," repeatedly. Mateo vanished during the voyage one evening and the boy was treated with care by the rest of us. I was on duty on the bridge that night, and made sure no one witnessed Mateo's ignominious end, over the back of the stern, after being beaten unconscious. I didn't do it, but I sure didn't stop it from happening, either. No one was going to miss him, that's for sure. We made sure the boy had his own room with a lock. We wanted to adopt him as official mascot, but the marine company couldn't have that. He was put ashore in Seattle when we docked there, and put into the system. I made sure to keep track of him and visited when I was stateside. He's forest ranger somewhere in Oregon these days. I often think of the trade we made, him for Mateo, and I don't have any regrets.

Sure, stories like that sound blood thirsty, and ignoring due process and law. But sometimes, when you are in the middle of the ocean, days from anywhere, these are things that happen to keep a community functioning. I'm not excusing it; I'm just explaining it. You can judge all you want, but unless you are there, unless you have to make those calls, you don't really understand what it is to be in that situation.

The thing is, you learn that self-reliance, that self-drive. No one makes you do things on a ship beyond what you have to do, but if you aren't part of a community, then you are made to feel it pretty damn quick. Ships aren't just a collection people doing their jobs; they are a little town. Sometimes even a little family, though most families aren't quite that dysfunctional. The point is, you learn to hold your own, make your own decisions and to live with the consequences. All the way from "was it a good idea to get that tattoo," to "this man is going to try and knife me when I'm on watch tonight, I need to be ready for that."

I made lifelong friends on those voyages, and met people from all round the world. I realized pretty quick what Mark Twain meant when he said that "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow mindedness." People are people. Doesn't matter where they come from, people are people. Some are cool, some are assholes, some have a chip on their shoulder and are intent on everyone else paying for it. Most are just trying to make it through the day, have a few laughs, hope someone likes them and get to the next morning. That's it. Doesn't matter what the color of your skin is, or who you think is directing your life, people are people wherever you go. Once you realize this, life goes a lot easier and you watch all those neo-Nazis parading with their tiki torches and just shake your head in disbelief. Too stupid and blinkered in their view of the world to know what the hell they are even talking about.

But back to Clarice. She was my rock, as I said. We'd been together for a long time, and she'd put up with all the late nights, the sudden phone calls and hurried departures, the times when the douchebag that we knew did the crime got away with it, and the few victories, where true scumbags got put away. She'd been a cop's wife, and she'd never really complained about it; she bore it and gave me the same smile in the morning, telling me as I left the house, as she always did, "go make the world safer, John." She was strong, pretty good looking, sweet and reliable, and I loved her.

Of course our marriage isn't perfect; no one's ever is. We couldn't have kids; she'd had an accident when young that destroyed her uterus, and that was all she wrote. She'd come to terms with it when young and I went along for the ride. I didn't see what was so great about my genes that I had to pass them on anyway, so I was content. I got her, all of her, and didn't have to share, and for that I was grateful. She had her work; she was a forensic accountant, working for one of the larger law firms in the city. She was the one they put on tracing the money, with cases ranging from a man hiding his wealth from his estranged-and-soon-to-be-divorced wife, all the way up to untangling a pyramid of Chinese companies, who were shifting money around and draining the balance a tiny bit one transfer at a time, to hide the fact that they were laundering it.

I went home to her, and a pleasant evening. Clarice and I binge watched TV; it was one thing we did together. We'd select some TV series on Netflix and just go through an entire season in a couple of weeks. Right now, we were watching "The Wire." Normally, I spend a lot of time pointing out how crap police shows are, being a cop myself, but "The Wire," well, they get as much right as they get wrong, which for TV, was nothing short of a miracle. Don't get me started on "NCIS" or "Bone" or any of the rest of those shitty shows. "The Wire," though, that's got it going on. Even if I did need subtitles to understand half of the dialog.

We made dinner together, as we often did, talking about our day; me in more general terms and her talking about the people and projects on which she was working. She had to be circumspect, too; she worked for lawyers and they have confidentiality issues, just like we do, but she could sure gossip about the other people she worked with, as could I.

I rarely shared the information about the cases I worked on. I'd talk about it in general terms, but never in specifics. I did talk in more detail once we went to court, since it was all public knowledge then, anyway. On two occasions, I had needed to talk to someone once the investigation was done. People imagine how hard and jaded detectives are, and to some extent, that's true. You harden through the job. There's only so many times you can see someone so truly evil and divorced from reality do something heinous, and then disavow that action and not end up with internal mental armor and some disengagement. You mostly get to see the worst of people in this job and never the best, and that also wears on the emotion you show and to a certain extent, feel.

I try not to become too miserable, too jaded. I know I have changed a lot since I returned to Minneapolis from my time at sea, but you don't really see it from the inside. I've done what I had to emotionally, to protect myself and my home life.

Despite all that, twice I've been on cases that have broken through those defenses. One was the case of two high school girls who went to see a band "on an adventure," as their mothers put it. We found their bodies three weeks later, battered and sexually abused. Their last hours had been extremely tortured, their tongues had been cut out and their eyes burned, even now, recounting this, I can feel the combined despair and anger at what they'd been put through. We found the traveling group who had done it. Once we had them in custody, along with enough evidence to send them away for a long time, the FBI got involved, and we linked them to a chain of these kinds of crimes of opportunity throughout the US over the past twenty years.

The four scumbags who were responsible, one woman and three men, - the woman being the ring leader, - had absolutely no remorse, and justified their behaviors with smug grins and distinct lack of interest in the feelings of either their victims or their families. They even boasted about how they had competitions among themselves to come up with more painful and degrading tortures to visit on their victims, tortures that would make the victim's pain last longer. Psychopaths in the purest sense of the word.

That case really affected me. We didn't have children - as I mentioned earlier, Clarice was injured in that area and so it just wasn't on the cards for us, but the suffering of those girls and their families... What they were put through, purely for the evil jollies of these scum bags, it was beyond belief. I'll never get those photographs out of my head. We ended up having to put a rotating armed guard on the perps for their own protection. I would not have been in the least bit surprised if they'd come to harm while in our lock up. I certainly would have looked the other way if I was on watch, and I might have even done the deed myself if they hadn't been guarded. Sometimes justice has nothing to do with the justice system.

I needed to talk to the division shrink after that one, and had many conversations with Clarice, coming to terms with what I'd witnessed. Clarice had been my home shrink, confidante, empathizer, and at the end, pillow. I don't know how I would have ended up without her to help smooth me out.

The other case was something different. We had a dead body on a commune farm outside of the city. The commune itself was pretty closed off, and it didn't take long for us to understand this was a cult. It took a while, but eventually we discovered that the individual had been ritually murdered for some ridiculous transgression. The more we probed, the more we found out about how these people lived; what their rules of civilization were. The more we learned, the more sickened we got. There were almost eighty people there, families and everything. The children were commodities, and treated as such. Taking the virginity of a child, boy or girl, was considered the highest honor you could be awarded, and everyone competed for that. It didn't matter if it was their own child, too; the honor of "first blood," as they called it, was too important and desired.

The thing about it was that no one felt it was bad. They knew to not acknowledge this entire part of their society, but not because they were ashamed or knew it was bad, but only because the outside world would see it that way. Internally, no one was ashamed. Once we broke through the wall of silence, they would sit there in the interrogation rooms, asking if we had children, and how they were being denied by not being part of this "wonderful initiation to the world."

It was staggeringly sickening, that parents could do this to their children and really believe it was the best thing to be doing. There was no remorse, no understanding of the societal impact to these children. They were that brainwashed.

I needed help after that, too. I just wanted to kill them all. The world's overall morality index would have gone up quite a lot if their breathing privileges had been revoked, of that I was sure. I wasn't alone, either. Their ringleader killed himself by jumping over the wall - seven floors off the ground - when he was brought up for the court case. It was just as well, since there was no chance he would survive prison.

Again, Clarice was there for me, along with the division shrink, helping me to manage the feelings, needs, urges and flat out anger. I don't know who, or what, I'd be without her there, to just hold my hand. Sometimes you don't need words, you just need presence.

So we were simpatico. We tried to share as much as we could, but as I mentioned, that was usually more about office situations and coworkers than it was actual cases. But, on occasion, we shared tidbits.