Memorite Rogue, Chapter 1, Scene 2
Here's the next installation from my novel.
If you find it interesting and want to go ahead and get the whole book, both print and ebook versions are available through http://memoriterogue.com/
Memorite Rogue
Chapter 1
Scene 2
1:36am
The file set like a depressing island in the sea of clutter that overflowed the top of Kevin Gould’s desk. Kevin stared at it intently as he thumbed the edge, as a sort of symbolic balancing on the precipice between tossing it back into the nether reaches of his desk, and actually getting to work on it. The indecisive teetering was relaxing in that he could make himself think he was beginning to work, while not actually doing any. He’d played this game too many times before, and he always made the same decision. He leaned forward in his chair, set his half empty coffee cup to the side, and opened the file.
Kevin had short dark hair, a masculine face with somewhat boyish eyes. At just over six foot, he was too short to be considered a basketball player, but he was built like one nonetheless. His suit jacket was tossed over the back of his chair. His sleeves were partly rolled up and he leaned his head on one hand as he flipped through the file with the other.
His desk sat in a small sea of desks of various officers and detectives. While the chief had his own office, anyone else that needed a desk, got one wherever one was available. To Kevin’s left was a desk shared by four officers, two from the day shift, two from the night. Behind him was Ben Tucker’s desk, the other detective currently assigned to the night shift. He wouldn’t be here for a couple of hours. The chief liked to stagger the shifts of the detectives so there would be some continuity to their work.
So far, Kevin had spent two weeks gathering all the bits of evidence contained in this file, and he still hadn’t been able to solve the case. Most of it he was very familiar with, but he needed to run through the evidence again to see if he’d missed anything. Almost always he had missed something, and after a few times running through it, he would catch what he’d missed and the pieces would fit together.
The evidence gathering had consumed most of the past few days, or at least what hadn’t been taken up by things he couldn’t get out of doing. Since the work had taken place away from the station and Kevin was salaried, no one noticed all the extra hours he’d put in. Kevin certainly wasn’t going to mention it. Someone higher up might think he was going too hard and pull some of his cases. He had found that the work didn’t really tire him out, and over the past three years he’d began to lean on it to fill his time.
Kevin had thoroughly enjoyed most of his first year on the force, especially since it made his parents proud to tell people their son was a police officer. Those first months had been full of the dullness of the routine at work, intermixed with the occasionally spurt of excitement, enjoying the camaraderie of his fellow officers and also enjoying the attention women gave him now that he was in uniform. That all ended abruptly. On a stormy night, two years and ten months earlier, his parents’ truck had slipped of the road, killing both of them. Kevin had been very close with his parents, almost to the point of continuing to live with them, something they really wanted, but he felt it might look like he hadn’t become his own person. His younger brother, Bill, was in college, and they both still saw their parents almost daily, and so Kevin had felt he’d never really left the warm coziness of the home they’d built. When he scored touchdowns in high school, it was to make them happy. When he worked hard in college, joined the ROTC and finally decided on a criminal justice major, it was with their approval in mind. He’d had no real idea about the direction he wanted his life to go, but his father had always told him that a man can be happy doing almost anything, as long as he does it the best he can. So far, those words had proven to be true, except that the primary source of happiness in Kevin’s life, his parents, had been taken away from him.
After the funeral, Kevin and Bill had had a long talk about their lives, and how they would handle things. There had still been quite a bit of insurance money after the funeral expenses. Their parents had long paid off the mortgage on their house, and there was even a tidy sum in the bank. They kept the house and Bill moved in to it. Kevin insisted that before they split the insurance money, enough be taken out for Bill’s tuition and college expenses. Bill protested that it wasn’t fair to Kevin, but Kevin won out. Even then, Bill still stayed out of school for a semester while he dealt with the emotional impact of the loss of his parents
Rather than grieve, Kevin worked. He applied himself to his chosen field with an earnestness that amazed his coworkers and superiors. For almost three years, he’d fended away the anguish of grief by focusing on his job. It had resulted a surprisingly early promotion to detective, and the respect of the entire department.
Meanwhile Bill had returned to college, met a girl, and got married. He talked Kevin into selling him his half of the house. Bill and his wife, Karen, settled in, finished college and Karen landed a nice job in the Human Resources department of a local company. Bill went to law school. They had Kevin over on a regular basis, sometimes casually, and fruitlessly, dropping hints about someone Karen thought Kevin might like to date.
Grief or not, Kevin had slowly come to accept what had happened, but he’d also developed a pattern of hard work and focus. While his police buddies were laughing it up at off duty hangouts, Kevin worked. In spite of ample opportunities to meet and get to know women over the past few years, for some reason Kevin avoided any kind of romantic entanglement. The few dates that he’d been pressured into going on, flopped due to his absentminded concentration on whatever case he was currently working on. Work or not, Kevin was beginning to feel that he was leaving an important part of his life behind. He just couldn’t bring himself to jump back into the dating market. It was too easy to dive into his work. Too easy to push away anything else to the exclusion of whatever case he was focused on at the time.
He opened the file and looked at the face of Hernando Sanchez. He was 19 and either was in a gang or was trying his hardest to look like he was. The current fad, especially among Hispanic teenagers was to try to dress like gang members. This left the good kids looking like bad kids. Hernando had a job as a stocker at a local electronics store. The owner had been reporting items stolen for almost a month when he’d caught Hernando leaving one day with about $5,000 worth of VCR’s in the back of his car.
The police were called and Hernando claimed he had no idea how the stuff got there, and pointed out that the lock on his car was broken. The owner insisted on pressing charges, and claimed over $100,000 worth of merchandise had been stolen during the month. By the time the police had arrived Hernando was angry. His demeanor had been cooperative before, but by now, he presented himself now as a very angry, young man. He was arrested and brought to the station. His father had died when he was little so it was his mother that came down to try to get him out, but the judge set the bail pretty high. She couldn’t even afford what the bail bondsmen were asking. So, Hernando remained in lock-up.
The problem was that while his fingerprints were on the boxes, so were at least a dozen other store employees’. Unless Kevin could find some more evidence to link him to the series of thefts, he could very well go free. The DA was pressuring the chief to make a stronger case. The chief had dumped the whole problem on Kevin. And Kevin hadn’t had time to process the case like he wanted to. And there was Hernando, staring back at Kevin from the picture. The angry defiant face Kevin saw at the scene and later when he questioned him was there in the mug shot, but next to it was a picture Hernando’s mother had pushed into Kevin’s hand that day she came in to beg for his release. This photo was of a conservatively dressed, smiling boy who looked anything but a thief. Kevin stared at the two photos intently. Which was the real Hernando?
“Hey, You busy?”
The interruption burst loudly into his train of thought, made worse by the loud scrape of a chair being dragged to his desk.
“You see that thing from the chief on the Memorites?”
It was Dan Redmond, his old partner. They’d worked together for 3 years until Kevin’s promotion to detective. Dan didn’t seem to harbor any resentment, but he did have a habit of being overly casual, as if Kevin was still an officer. Dan obviously wanted to chat.
“You gonna work with one uh them Memorite freaks?”
“Freaks? I don’t think you can call them freaks,” Kevin said, closing the case file, and sitting back.
“Yeah, well, what else call lobotomized robots from some cult?”
Kevin closed his eyes and sighed.
“Okay, they aren’t lobotomized. They aren’t robots and it’s not a cult. My aunt happens to go to the same church as the one over at the University, and the last I heard Baptists weren’t a cult.” Kevin chuckled, “And I’d sure like to see you tell my aunt she belongs to a cult.” Kevin laughed at the thought of Dan trying such a suicide stunt.
“They just go to regular churches to throw people off. And if they aren’t lobotomized, then how do you explain how they do all that stuff they do. And have you ever seen one of ’em? They act like robots. C’mon, open your eyes, man.”
For years, Kevin had tolerated Dan’s constant suspicions of everything from the CIA to what the pulp in the orange juice was really made of. He’d learned to dismiss it as mildly humorous eccentricities. But sometimes it did grow tiring.
“Well, all I know is,” Kevin said, letting the case file thump against the desk, “they’ve not bothered me any, which makes them one up on you.”
“Ha, ha, laugh it off smart guy, but when they take over, you remember who warned you first.”
With that, Dan swung the chair back to where it had been and walked away.
Watching him, Kevin slowly shook his head and grinned. He picked the file back up and laid it open in front of him. His train of thought broken, he started all over again reviewing the case.
Posted by Danny Carlton at August 31, 2007 7:57 AM