CHAPTER TWENTY
The entire street was cordoned off and the residents of the trailer park were being evacuated to a church a block over.
A patrolman lifted the yellow tape and Grant and Marti walked through. The police cars were across the street from the trailer in question, forming a barricade for protection. Everybody on scene, including RJ and Pete, were behind those cars.
The detective in charge of the case, with a blowhorn in hand, hurried over to the chief.
“We’ve got a line of communication?” Grant asked him.
“Yes sir. But his request hasn’t changed. He’ll only speak to the consultant.”
“Does he know me by name?” Marti asked the detective.
“It doesn’t appear so, no ma’am. He keeps saying that consultant .”
“Has he said why he wants to talk to me?”
That was a negative for the detective too. “He’s not telling us anything. He’ll only talk to you.”
“He apparently has something major to tell her, Chief,” said Pete.
“Probably about the shooting at Karney’s,” said RJ, “since both of those suspects are dead and the community is convinced both mass shootings are related.”
“He wants to talk to her, Chief,” the detective said again. “And only her.”
“Did he specify where?” asked Grant.
The detective nodded his head. “Yes sir. He wants her inside with him.”
Grant stood there as his men continued to speak as if it was even a possibility. But Grant knew better. He knew they were out of their minds if they thought he was going to let Marti go anywhere near that murderer.
When they kept on talking about it as if it was only a question of logistics, Grant decided to put a period to it. “That’s not happening,” he said bluntly. “Are there any hostages inside that trailer?” he asked the detective, moving on. “Or do we even know?”
“We asked and he said nobody’s in there. His neighbors said he lives alone.”
“Well at least that,” said RJ.
“Have you sent in a backdoor team yet?” Marti asked the detective.
Everybody looked at her. “What’s that?” Grant asked her.
The lack of knowledge of basic police work in this department astounded Marti still. Was every high ranking official on the force rich fat cats with no real police experience too? “While we distract the shooter up front with conversation or whatever we need to do to keep his attention, you need to get SWAT or another team of cops to go into that trailer through the backdoor.”
“Why would we risk our men when we can burn that bastard down to the ground?” asked RJ. “All the people he’s already killed.”
“But what if he has intel on the shooting at that grocery store? At Karney’s?” Marti said. “If we can take him alive, we need to do that.”
“But I thought you agreed the two shootings weren’t related,” Grant said.
“I didn’t say they weren’t related. I said the motives might be different. But they could be a part of a network. The time of both incidences are just too close to rule that completely out.”
Grant exhaled. That made sense too! “Get SWAT over here,” Grant said as he went to the trunk of his car. When Marti saw him pull out a bulletproof vest, her heart dropped. She hurried over to him.
“You aren’t going in,” she said as if she was the boss.
“Check her out,” said RJ with a grin.
“You’re ordering the chief around now?” asked Pete.
“I mean why are you going in, Chief? That’s a job for SWAT.”
“I don’t want anybody going rogue in that trailer and decide to shoot when shooting isn’t necessary. I’ll be leading the charge,” he said as he put on his vest.
“But you should let the police handle that,” she insisted.
Everybody looked at her. Including Grant, who continued to put on his vest. “What are you stupid?” asked Pete. “He’s the chief of police!”
He’s a businessman with zero experience as a cop when he became chief of police, Marti wanted to remind them. But she held her tongue. She was too worried about Grant. She wished she had let RJ’s suggestion stand. “Maybe we could just burn it down like Captain Jeffers said,” she said to Grant, and Pete quickly elbowed RJ.
Grant knew why she said it. She was worried about him. But she was right: They needed to take that shooter in alive just in case there was a network of mass shooters spacing out their crimes. He ignored her suggestion. “RJ, I’ll radio in when we’re in position,” he said as he opened his front driver seat door. “I want you to then start a conversation with the shooter. Let him know the consultant has arrived and she’ll be coming in. But ask him questions about how can he guarantee her safety and shit like that. Don’t make it too easy on him or he’ll know we’re bullshitting him. We’ll get in and try to keep his ass alive. But you’ve got to keep him distracted.”
“Will do, Chief,” RJ said as Grant and the three-man SWAT team hopped into his Mercedes.
But Grant took another look at a very-distressed Marti and pressed down his window. “Don’t you move from that spot,” he ordered her. “You hear me?”
She was reluctant, but she nodded her head. For a quick second, they exchanged a look that made clear he knew she was worried about him because he was worried about her. And then he drove away.
“Did you see that?” Pete whispered to RJ.
“Why are they going in the Chief’s car?” Marti asked them. “SWAT doesn’t have an armored vehicle?”
RJ laughed. “Gal where you think you at?” Pete asked her. “This ain’t no Memphis! Memphis has over six hundred thousand citizens to support them. We barely got fifty thousand. Who’s gonna pay for all this armored stuff you’re talking about?”
But Marti was unable to shake her anguish, and she knew Pete and RJ saw it. That was why hooking up with Grant was a horrible idea. She was worried sick about him. To her, he was the sweetest, kindest man she’d ever known. To her, he was no cop, but was an administrator who had no business leading any charge to detain a murderer. “What are you going to say to distract him?” she asked RJ.
“What the chief told me to say.”
“But I mean what are you going to actually say?”
“None of your damn business,” RJ said, tiring of her heavy-handedness. “I’m a captain. You are, or were , a lieutenant. I outrank your ass any day of the week. Stay in your lane.”
But even that unnecessarily hostile conversation didn’t rile Marti. Her entire focus was on Grant.
And when Grant radioed in that he and SWAT were in position, she watched RJ with an eagle’s eye take the reins.
RJ began speaking in the bullhorn. “Hello, Shooter?” Then he looked at the detective. “What’s his name again?”
Marti couldn’t believe it. She snatched the bullhorn away from RJ. “This is Marti Nash,” she said as RJ attempted to grab it back. “This is the consultant you said you would like to speak with?”
“Not out there,” the shooter yelled back. “You got to come in here!”
“Why inside? Why can’t we talk like we’re talking now?”
“Because I don’t want them to hear what I got to say.”
“Who’s them?” Marti asked him.
“Them cops!” Emotion was in his voice. “They’re trying to destroy me.”
RJ rolled his eyes. “Nobody’s trying to destroy that nut-brain.”
But all Marti wanted was to keep the shooter engaged in conversation with her. “Why would you say they’re trying to destroy you?”
“Because they are!”
“Can you name who you’re talking about?”
“Why are you believing that bullshit?” Pete asked her.
“Give me a name,” Marti said into the bullhorn. She was singularly focused.
“They know who they are. I didn’t shoot nobody!”
That comment surprised Marti. “They have you on tape.”
“That ain’t me and they know it! I would never kill anybody. What I look like killing and maiming all those people?”
But then Grant’s voice could be heard over the radio yelling “ Police! Drop your weapon !”
Marti held onto the bullhorn with both hands as she listened to the interchange. She prayed there would be no gunfire, and there wasn’t. Just a lot of movement as if they were tackling their suspect or something equally physical. “ Cuff him and frisk him ,” she then heard the chief say. And then he said into the radio: “ We got him ,” and all the cops out there erupted in applause. Marti nearly dropped the bullhorn she was so relieved.
But then RJ snatched it from her. “Pull that stunt again and I’ll make it my business to kick your ass out of Dodge. You feel me?”
Marti and RJ looked into each other’s eyes. The only blacks at the scene, there should have been some sense of tribalism, but there wasn’t. No two people, Marti felt, could have been more dissimilar.
But when Grant came out of the front door with the shooter in handcuffs, she hurried toward him. RJ and Pete hurried too.
But the shooter was looking at Marti. “You that consultant?”
“Yes.”
“They gonna get you too,” he said as Grant turned him over to two patrolmen and they began walking him to a patrol car.
“Who’s they?” Marti asked him. “And why would they want to get me?”
“Because you ain’t crooked like them. They’re all crooks, every one of them. I didn’t kill nobody. And look what they doing to me.”
“Get him out of here!” Grant ordered as the patrolmen hurried their suspect to the patrol car.
While RJ and Pete talked with the SWAT team, Marti moved over to Grant, who was taking off his bulletproof vest. “You’re okay?”
“Yup.”
“He didn’t resist?”
“That’s the crazy part,” said Grant. “He didn’t even have a gun.”
Marti was astonished to hear that. “He didn’t?”
“Not even a knife. No weapons whatsoever.”
“That’s unusual right? Even for a town like this?”
“Hell yeah it’s unusual. I couldn’t believe it either until we cuffed him and,” Grant started saying when they all suddenly heard a single gunshot. It came from the patrol car.
They all ran over to the car, led by Grant, but Marti was right on his tail.
When they got over there, the patrolman who had taken custody of the suspect had his weapon drawn, and the suspect, a close-range gunshot wound to the head, was slumped in his seat obviously dead. But she checked his vitals anyway.
“What the hell happened?” Grant asked the patrolman.
“He kept spitting on me, Chief, in my face and everywhere, so I pulled my gun on him and warned him to cut that shit out. Then he head-putted me, causing me to fall against him, and my gun went off.”
“He was in handcuffs!” Marti yelled out at the officer. “Why didn’t you just move your face out of his range, and then put a spit guard on him?”
“I didn’t mean to shoot him!” the officer yelled back. “My gun went off. It was an accident!”
“Who are you, Barney Fyfe?” a still-angry Marti asked him. “How could your gun just go off that easily? You’re a police officer!”
But the cop was sticking to his story, even though it was a very unlikely story to Marti. She looked at the other cops. They were nodding as if it was a reasonable tale to them. She looked at Grant. Was he buying that bullshit too?
Grant looked flustered to her, but she couldn’t tell if he was flustered because their suspect was dead and some serious questions would, or at least should arise, or was he flustered because his officer was in trouble? When the chief snatched his officer’s gun before he accidentally shot somebody else, Marti decided he was going to protect his cop.
“Get out of here,” Grant ordered him. Then he ordered one of the detectives to go with him and take a statement.
“I didn’t mean to shoot him, Chief,” the officer said again as he and the detective were leaving the scene. Another bad idea to Marti.
But it all seemed too pat for Marti. Just after the shooter said they had the wrong guy and that they were out to destroy him, he ended up dead in police custody?
Grant might have been buying it, but Marti wasn’t.
But it wasn’t like he gave her a chance to investigate further.They all seemed to be circling their wagons. They all seemed more concerned about how it looked rather than why it happened.
“Have we heard from City Hall?” RJ asked the senior officers that surrounded them.
“They called to let us know the mayor’s on his way.”
“Damn,” said RJ. “He’s on his way to take a victory lap because we caught the shooter and caught him alive. Now he’s dead. Damn.”
“He’s gonna have your hide, Chief,” said Pete. “The citizens of Belgrave are convinced the two mass shootings were connected to each other, and they wanted answers from the lone surviving shooter. Now this. He may fire you for real this time.”
Grant wasn’t thinking about the mayor or his future as the chief of police. The BOBs didn’t let Dooney hire who he wanted as chief, and the BOBs weren’t going to let him fire him to put in place who he wanted as chief. Grant was worried about Marti.
“How are we gonna handle this, Chief?” the detective in charge of the investigation asked him.
But Grant frowned, showing his frustration. “How the hell should I know? This shit just happened! You make sure you secure this scene and inside that trailer too. Make sure everybody’s doing their job. The mayor’s coming with cameras. This is supposed to be a triumph for him. Those cameras better not show anything we’re doing wrong onsite that those ambulance-chasing got damn lawyers can later use against us in the lawsuit that’s sure to come.”
“Yes sir,” the detective said, and all of the senior staff walked away to avoid the chief’s ire too.
The chief finally looked at Marti.
“That’s a bullshit story,” Marti said. “You know that, right?”
The chief didn’t respond.
“He said the suspect spat all over him, including in his face. I didn’t see any spit on that officer whatsoever. Then he said the suspect head-butted him so hard that he fell against him. But there’s no evidence of a head-butt either. It’s bullshit, Grant. It’s all bullshit.”
“And what do you suggest I do about it?” Grant had an edge to his voice. He felt as if he was being pulled from both sides.
But Marti had no such feelings. “You should fire him,” she said forcefully too. “That’s what you should do about it.”
“Fire him? That’s your suggestion? I fire him so I can just tee up every damn lawyer in this town looking to defend the perp’s family and force the city to pay out more money than it can afford? That’s your suggestion?”
“Bump the money!” Marti yelled. “It’s called doing the right thing. That man was in handcuffs. That man said he wasn’t the shooter.”
“Well guess what? The video says differently!”
“Are we sure about that? Are you certain about that? That video could have been altered.”
Grant frowned.“ Altered ?”
“With A.I., yes. It’s possible, Grant.”
“So is life on Mars. But are we living there now?” Then he settled back down. “I want you to get an officer to take you back to your car. I want you to get in it and go back to your hotel. It’s going to be a long day. I don’t want any of this shit blowing back on you.”
Marti frowned. “Why would it blow on me?”
“Because they need as many scapegoats as they can get. I’m the head of the police force. I’m always their target. But you’re the new face in town. The mayor and his office are going to do everything in their power to discredit the governor through you.”
“I don’t even know the governor. I’ve never even seen him in person before in my life.”
“You know that and I know that. They know it too. But does this bloodthirsty town knows it?”
“And how can the mayor blame you? What that officer did wasn’t your fault. He can’t blame you.”
“He can and he will. I have to stay in the fire. But you don’t. You’re getting out of here. I’ll get somebody to drive you back to the station.”
But Marti wanted intel. An insider that might know more than the chief was willing to tell her. “I can ask if Captain Jeffers can drive me back,” she said.
Grant looked at her. “Didn’t he try to come onto you the last time he drove you anywhere?”
How would he know that? “It was no big deal.”
But Grant looked as if it was a major deal. “You stay away from him. You hear me?”
“He only asked to use my bathroom.”
“Do you hear me, Markita?”
The chief seemed so concerned that she couldn’t help but hear him. “Yes sir.”
Then he exhaled. Looked around and saw an unattractive chubby cop chewing the fat with some of the other cops. “Cranston!” he called out.
Cranston looked nervous when he heard the chief call his name. “Sir?”
Grant motioned for him to come over. Then Grant looked at Marti. He wanted to pull her into his arms. But he knew what gossip that would spurn. He managed to sneak in a hard squeeze of her arm instead. “I’ll come over there as soon as I can get away.”
“Okay,” Marti said. She wanted that hug as badly as he wanted to give it to her.
Grant ordered Officer Cranston to take her to the station so she could pick up her car. As they were walking away, she glanced back at Grant. She was worried about him and it showed on her face.
So much so that RJ and Pete, who had been watching her and Grant’s encounter, saw it too. “Who do they think they’re fooling?” Pete asked. “The chief’s tapping the shit out of that ass just as sure as I’m standing here.”
“Forget them,” RJ said. “You get to that patrolman that shot the perp. Tell him good job. But make sure he’d better keep his mouth shut.”
Pete looked at RJ. “That was a close call.”
“Too close,” said RJ. “That’s a problem.”
“We eliminated the problem though.”
“But what if it hadn’t been one of our guys taking him to the station? What if he wasn’t as quick on his feet and didn’t pull that trigger? We’re getting sloppy. They aren’t gonna like that. We’ve got to tighten this ship before it takes us all down.”
RJ looked at Pete, as if to remind him of just how serious their situation truly was, and then he walked away.