provide miscellaneous details about the sedan as well as a license plate number. Since the car had Illinois tags, officials from that state’s patrol division were already in the loop.
I was keeping my ears open for lack of anything else to do. Thus far, from what I had been able to pick up from the various conversations I overheard, there was presently an alert out on both sides of the river but still no sign of the vehicle.
I felt like I should be doing something. I’m not sure what, but that wasn’t the point. I hated the idea of being useless with regard to everything that had transpired. But, I suppose being ordered to ‘wait over there until we need you’ can tend to do that to a person. All in all, I was starting to feel like an extra in a B-movie but without the paycheck or catered buffet lunch.
At the moment, I was watching from the stairwell, sitting on the third step up from the bottom and trying my best to stay out of the way. So far, I had been managing to do so but not without some shifting and shuffling to allow the occasional cop to pass. From what I could see going on in front of me, this was probably the only spot where I was going to have any success whatsoever in the endeavor.
I looked away from the scene long enough to glance at my watch. Somewhere around an hour and a half had slipped past us since this all began: ninety minutes disappearing into history only to be relived by eyewitness accounts, repeated over and over to the point of tediousness. And then repeated again.
Still, even though I had only been asked to tell my accounting a half-dozen times so far, it felt as if I had been in this parking garage just shy of forever. On the other hand, it seemed like the span of interconnected moments had gone by in a sudden blur. I suppose it was yet another of those peculiar stress-induced dichotomies that blindsides you following an unexpected adrenalin rush.
As I watched, I took particular note of the fact that the number of warm bodies occupying the parking garage had increased several fold over what it had been just thirty minutes ago. Now, while I was no expert, unfortunately, I was also not a stranger to crime scenes. The ratio of cops to the singularity of the crime seemed to me like it was already moving beyond overkill. On top of that, something told me there would be even more by the time it was all said and done. There was something more to this than met the eye; even the eye of a witness, or so it seemed.
For the time being, it looked like I was stuck here. Ben was still limping around angrily, but now he was heading in my direction. He had been barking at anyone in a uniform and even some who weren’t. This was far from the first time I had ever seen him agitated, but there was something different this go around. It wasn’t that this scene felt any more tense than any other I’d been on, just different. There was an overtone of urgency that went beyond any I’d felt before. To me at least, there was even a palpable sense of personal fear coming from the cops on the scene. Not just for the victim but for themselves as well. That was something I had never before experienced at a crime scene, and it bothered me.
I already knew my friend wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while. His day off had ended the moment he heard the woman scream. As for me, even if I wanted to get myself a taxi home, I was a witness and I’d already been told that I would need to give a statement. I had thought I’d already done that when I told them what I saw the first six times, but apparently that was not official. When they would be getting around to me again was anyone’s guess.
“Hey, Row,” Ben greeted me sullenly as he drew himself up against the stairwell railing.
“Hey, Chief,” I returned, starting to pull myself to my feet. “You need to sit down?”
He motioned for me to stay seated. “Sit, sit. I’m good.”
“You sure?” I asked, stopping mid-rise. “It looked to me like you had a pretty serious limp there.”
“I’ll live.”
I lowered myself back to the step and regarded him for a moment. “The paramedic threatened you with a hypodermic, didn’t he?”
“Yeah.” He let out something between a laugh and a sigh. “The words ‘tetanus booster’ got mentioned.”
“You probably need one.”
“We’ll see. Nothin’s broke.” He gave a slight nod as he spoke, but the expression on his face was saying ‘hell no.’
“So much for lunch, eh?” I offered after a moment.
My friend was looking out across the lot, massaging the back of his neck and lost in thought.
I spoke again, “Ben?”
He started and glanced over at me, “What? Oh, yeah. That’s a bust for sure. Maybe dinner depending on how this goes.”
He brought his hand up to smooth his hair then allowed it to fall back down to his side. He huffed out a heavy breath then addressed me with an added seriousness, “So listen, Row, the Major Case Squad is gonna be runnin’ this one.”
“Okay,” I acknowledged. “That’s not a big surprise.”
“What I’m tryin’ to tell ya’ is that Bee-Bee is on her way,” he emphasized. “Hell, she’s probably downstairs already.”
“Bee-Bee,” I repeated and rolled my eyes. “Just what I need.”
The moniker struck home. It was short for Bible Barb, which was probably the least offensive of the nicknames given to one Lieutenant Barbara Albright. She was a cop and a self-serving bureaucrat all rolled into one package, and she was in command of the MCS.
Like most of those her rank and above, she spent the majority of her time pushing a pencil. But that is where the similarity ended because unlike the others, she had a penchant for getting directly involved. Unfortunately, her involvement was not always a plus.
What had garnered her the various epithets was her self-righteous attitude. That, combined with the fact that she not only wore a badge but also a prominently displayed gold cross around her neck, had earned her the reputation of ‘God’s Personal Cop.’
She consciously built upon that distinction as well. She wore her badge like a shield and wielded the cross like a sword, using its symbolism like a heavy-handed weapon with which to mete out her own interpretation of justice. To Lieutenant Albright, the laws she was sworn to uphold were but secondary suggestions to the commandments held within the Holy Bible; and she was more than happy to tell you so in no uncertain terms.
While this didn’t necessarily make her popular among the ranks, she still had her supporters, and there were enough of them to make a difference. She managed to skirt around various departmental policies and flaunt her religion without reproach. Still, none of this would really matter at all were it not for one simple fact: she absolutely despised me.
While her initial hatred of me began simply because of my Pagan roots and religious practices, my being a Witch was not the only reason for her disdain. Unfortunately, I had no choice but to accept responsibility for a portion of it, as I had been partly responsible for sparking an Internal Affairs investigation of her.
Just a handful of months ago, I had been the object of a madman’s quest to eradicate WitchCraft from the face of the earth. Eldon Andrew Porter had taken the lives of several innocent people in the process, two of them my friends. Before all was said and done, I had come close to losing my own more than once.
During a single day that had been spawned by nothing less than hell itself, far too many things had gone horribly wrong. Information had been leaked; potentially dangerous mistakes had been made, and events that could have only been deliberate sabotage had occurred. All of these things had placed my life in jeopardy at every turn and had almost allowed Porter to escape. I, among a few others, believed that ‘Bible Barb’ had been responsible for it all.
While in the end she had admitted to using me as the bait to draw Eldon Porter out of hiding, she had been officially cleared of any other wrongdoing and was given nothing more than an administrative slap on the wrist. As for me, I was never fully convinced of her innocence and didn’t know that I ever would be.
At the same time, her own convoluted thinking made her believe that I was the root of the problem. She had even commented during a newspaper interview that had it not been for me, at least two of the victims would still be alive. I was already torturing myself over that very fact on a daily basis, and I sure as hell didn’t need her fueling the fire for me. I was doing a fine job of that all by myself.
“Look, Row, if it was up to me, I’d get you outta here right now before she gets here,” Ben offered. “But we both know that ain’t gonna happen.”
“Yeah,” I nodded. “It’s okay.”
