November 1, 2009
With all due respect to other professions, being a cop, especially a homicide detective, has got to be the most frustrating job on earth. We’re constantly at a disadvantage, unable to use our skills until someone gets killed. Even the happiest of resolutions is cold comfort for the surviving relatives and the best we can say is that we took a killer off the streets before they killed anyone else. It’s like trying to tie up a tourniquet on a spurting wound only after the victim has lost a lot of blood. All you can do is damage control.
We’re also at a disadvantage in that we’re playing catch up with a perp who usually has some nominal skills in covering up after themselves. And even the simplest of timelines and the most unsophisticated of MOs still have to be painstakingly reconstructed, like pulling a handful of paper strips out of a shredder. You may be able, with a lot of tape and even more patience, to reconstruct the original document but you’ll rarely if ever get it perfect.
Then there are cases that are simply nightmares, cases involving dead bodies that yield few clues and offer nothing substantial or plausible in the way of motive, means and opportunity. The mass suicide at the Sheraton on Halloween night was one of those cases. For starters, we didn’t know whether to classify it as a mass suicide or a mass murder. There were no murder weapons, little in the way of useful forensic evidence, no apparent motive and the locked doors and secluded penthouse offered virtually no opportunity.
It’s the kind of case that makes other homicide detectives wonder if they should’ve taken that civil service exam to become mailmen, instead.
I especially was even more at a disadvantage than usual because I was HALO’d into this case with three hours of sleep and only Rodriguez’s horrible coffee to compensate for my lack of REM.
“Who the fuck made this coffee? Lucretia Borgia?” I looked around and Roddy smirked. I’d always suspected that Rodriguez made the most horrible coffee on earth just to make our chief break down and use some of his discretionary budget to buy us a coffee pod maker or at least a French Press. If his coffee was any worse, Internal Affairs would be investigating him and CSI would have our coffee maker at their lab.
I walked to the fax machine and was disappointed to find nothing from the Coroner’s Office. The sole survivor we’d found in the penthouse was Sylvia Feingold, Congressman Feingold’s wife. She’d managed to say one word before she’d passed away: Clarissa. She was calling out for the couple’s only child, their daughter Clarissa. The fax we were waiting for was the autopsy results from the ME and we’d already alerted the Braintree PD to go to the Congressman’s house to give their daughter the bad news. I already felt sorry for the poor kid. She was only 17 years old and already had one suicide attempt to her credit by the time she was 15.
As with Senator Dumont, Congressman Feingold abandoned his wife and leaped out of one of the windows on the floor below the penthouse. As it turned out, he was the one wearing the angel costume that left behind the feather we’d found at one of the crime scenes. So far, that was the only mystery we were able to solve. Up to this point, we came up dry again and again. I was beginning to feel like an idiot put in a bare round room and told to look for the penny in the corner.
I lurched back to my desk and checked my email. Ron the CSI guy had just sent me the picture attachment of Mrs. Dumont’s dead face with the ice crystals on it. I opened up the file and magnified it but it told me nothing usable especially when pixilation became an issue and ruined the resolution. I was utterly incapable of understanding what could’ve caused the crystallization on her skin then filed it away in the ever-growing To Do list in the back of my mind.
Braintree, MA, November 1, 2009
Some of the other kids who didn’t pass out had gone home, still leaving behind about a dozen others who’d either gone under or were about to. Just on the off chance Clarissa’s folks would come home, we had to get rid of them as well as all the beer cans and I volunteered to help her. In order to get a 20 on their location, Clarissa tried calling both her parents’ cell phones but they never picked up, which was odd. What was even more fucked up was that they hadn’t once called in to check up on their daughter. If anything, Clarissa’s folks were even more neurotic Jewish parents than my own, which is saying something. After all, she was their only child and, like me, had a “history” as professional people like to euphemistically say.
Before we got started with the garbage collection, she and I stood in front of one of the bedroom doors, our arms wrapped around each other’s waists. My little Trojan soldier finally remembered half his purpose in life and was beginning to rise to attention. Clarissa had taken off her bandanna and had pulled her gleaming red hair back in its usual high and tight ponytail and looked smoking hot. As we stood in the upstairs hallway, we swayed gently from side to side, her left hand around my back but her right on my chest, our crotches barely touching. It was like she was pulling me toward her while ready to push me away at any moment.
It was obvious she wanted to but she was freaked out by the thought of her parents coming home at any moment plus there were still a few of our idiot friends downstairs who were technically awake and slurring stupid comments to each other.
“Adam, it doesn’t feel right,” she half said/half whispered. “Not tonight, baby.”
I didn’t want to press her too hard on it and give her the impression that I only wanted to bury my little Trojan soldier with full honors ending with a ten squirt salute. Still, this was the closest we’d ever come to actually making out and neither one of us had ever been this close to walking into a bedroom together. Look at it from my point of view, dude: It was like standing between third and home plate with no outs and winding up getting stranded. So near and yet so far.
I always loved and always will love how she could so perfectly and smoothly pull her hair back without even using a brush and I stroked the drawn back part of her hair, playing with her perfect ponytail. I then hugged her and said, “OK. When the time is right.” Looks like Danica Patrick would get some attention tonight, after all. Clarissa whispered, “Thank you, babe. I knew you’d understand.” I nodded and my little soldier wilted back into parade rest if not totally at ease.
“Let’s take the garbage out. Then we’ll get the beer cans later.” She laughed and we started our way downstairs. It looked like we wouldn’t be getting help from any of our remaining friends even though Clarissa set up garbage bags all over the house for the beer cans and told everyone to use them. Of course, they didn’t and the morons left blue and silver beer cans on the mantle, the furniture, the floor, even leaving some outside. One of her biggest worries was that some got spilled on the rug or on the couches and chairs. The last thing we wanted to do was hunt the entire house for wet spots, blot up stale, piss-warm beer and to get out deodorizer and a hair dryer.
Most of the beer cans were a quarter to almost totally full and we schlepped around the house, walking over lifeless bodies and throwing aluminum and beer into trash bags. While we were collecting beer cans like a couple of rag pickers, we asked them to leave, our voices getting louder and angrier when they didn’t listen. I even gently kicked a couple of them in the ass.
Obviously, we couldn’t throw out 96 beer cans in her folks’ trash can but Clarissa had that covered. She knew of an unlocked dumpster across town and we could pitch them in that. We found about 5 or 6 unopened beers in the fridge and we took them, too.
“You assholes better be gone by the time me and Adam get back. You all got five minutes.” Few of them listened. “I mean it!” she said much louder. “I’ll call the cops and tell them you invaded my house. Don’t forget, you’re all hammered and wouldn’t pass a breathalyzer test and we’re taking away all the evidence.” She hoisted a bag to punctuate her point. “It’ll look like you were already wasted when you got here.”
At the mention of the police, some of our friends stirred from the floor and the furniture and began looking for their skateboards. Of course, Clarissa wouldn’t call the cops even if her old man was a Congressman. They’d alert her folks, they’d come home sooner and want to know why a bunch of drunken kids suddenly showed up at her door on Halloween night. But they were too baked to put that together.
“It helps having a Dad who’s a politician.” she sweetly smiled as she took the keys for their Range Rover off the hall table. “You learn from the best how to bluff and play hard ball.”
We loaded the two contractor bags of beer cans into the back and Clarissa backed out of the driveway. Like she said, there was a construction site with an open dumpster and we tossed both bags into it. By the time we got back to her street, the Braintree police were already in her driveway.
“Oh shit!” she said, putting her hand over her mouth and slamming on the brakes. The front door was wide open and the cops were already inside. We saw them talking to our friends and they gestured this way and that, probably telling them that we just took off but didn’t know where we were.
“Fuck. Now what?”
“No way am I going back there,” she said. Clarissa put the Rover in reverse and backed up where we just came from, did a three point turn in a neighbor’s driveway and peeled off.
“Clarissa, you can’t just take off. That’s your house.”
“No, no fuckin’ way,” she said. We were both assuming that the cops showed up when one of the neighbors complained about the noise and the sight of our stupid friends outside. I mean, it was obvious that we were having a party and maybe one of them called her folks and the police. Either way, she was totally boned if no one else. I felt guilty because I was part of the party.
I was about to tell her that she had to face the music and go back when a second Braintree cruiser passed us. The cop must’ve recognized the congressman’s car because he immediately put on his lights and siren and turned around. Then Clarissa did the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen her do: She hit the gas pedal and tried to run away. I wondered at that moment if we were going to wind up on one of those tabloid shows about stupid criminals and car chases narrated by some smarmy smart ass.
“Clarissa? Honey? This isn’t a good idea. It’s only a party, after all. It’s not like anyone died or anything. But if you try to run away from the cops that’s exactly what may happen!”
All she did was look behind her, her ponytail almost whipping my face twice and hit the gas harder even as she took a sharp left. By this time, we were back at the construction site and she never saw a gravel pit that was on my side. The Range Rover was already practically on two wheels when she took that turn doing 70 or so and the pile turned us over on the driver side. It suddenly occurred to me that neither of us was wearing our seat belts because we were just going on a five minute drive. My body landed on top of her as the car began to roll and the last things I remembered hearing was Clarissa screaming, glass breaking and police sirens.
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