Chapter 9 - Jenna’s Interlude
Jenna walked past the sea of desks at her precinct headquarters, her face furrowed in fierce conviction as she marched past her onlooking male co-workers with the clicking of her chic black boots.
She saw her chief, an older black man with a mustache like Tom Selleck, on the phone through the blinders of a window wall beside the wooden door.
And he was staring right at her.
Jenna walked right in without a care. “Chief!”
“I’ll have to call you back,” the police chief said before hanging up his plastic white phone with a gentle click. “Detective O’Brien. I hear you’ve been busy.”
“We’ve got a problem,” Jenna pulled up a chair and sat right in front of his desk. “The Feds just busted a property owned by Alistair Gaines.”
“I know,” the chief enunciated tersely with an unblinking stare, his black mustache peppered with white whiskers.
“You know?” Jenna recoiled. “How?”
“Because that was him on the phone just now,” the chief stated as he slowly walked around to the front of his desk, leaning back to sit on it with his arms crossed. “And he’s concerned that we’re not doing enough to ensure public safety.”
“Public safety?” Jenna blurted incredulously. “The Feds just stonewalled my investigation and—”
“There is no investigation, Detective O’Brien. You followed up on a call involving a breaking and entering, illegal weapons were found, and the case went to Washington. That’s it; end of story.”
“Oh, come on, Carl!” Jenna shot to her feet. “We both know that Mr. Gaines is just trying to get ahead of the issue before anything comes to light. The Feds found more than just a few dead bodies, and they obviously didn’t catch whoever hit his warehouse or he wouldn’t have bothered calling you.”
“Close the door,” the chief ordered, waiting for Jenna to get up and shut his office door and close the blinds, then got up and paced back to his chair to sit down.
“Be that as it may, he’s friends with the Mayor and the Commissioner, so if we’re gonna keep our jobs, we’ve gotta tow a certain line. ”
Jenna shook her head and closed her eyes. “This isn’t justice. I thought it was our job to help people.”
“It’s our job to help as many people as we can!” the chief censured with a shout as he rose to his feet, placing his fists on the desk and leaning forward. “But you’re a cop, not a superhero.”
“My dad was…” Jenna uttered, averting her eyes to glance at the memorial portrait hanging on the chief’s wall.
The chief looked too, sighing wistfully before looking down at his desk and shaking his head. “What did you find?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Jenna spat, taking out the sandwich bag with the Ichor in it and tossing it onto the chief’s desk in front of him. “If that stuff’s involved, we can’t get close.”
The chief carefully pinched the bag and picked it up, observing its contents. “Is this what I think it is?”
“Yeah.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“I found it in the warehouse; the Feds missed it when they cleaned the place out,” Jenna scowled.
“This stuff’s as illegal as it gets, but Gaines still isn’t behind bars.
Ichor wasn’t hitting the streets until he bought that building.
He’s killing our town, Carl, and we can’t even do anything about it. ”
The chief straightened his posture and took a deep breath, then held the bag out over the desk to return it to Jenna. “Keep that.”
“What for?”
“Because it’s your only evidence. But you need to be careful, Jenna. This is above our pay grade, and I can’t protect you if powerful people are implicated. You’re on a thin tightrope, so restrict your investigation to finding out who broke into that warehouse.”
Jenna made a face of hopeful relief, then tucked the bag into the hem of her skirt. “Thank you, Chief. But I don’t know where to look. Whoever did it is probably long gone by now.”
“Actually, probably not,” the chief grinned proudly. “Mr. Gaines wanted me to show him footage from our street cameras, which I politely declined. You have a lead.”
Jenna smacked the desk in eager excitement. “What is it?”
“A local establishment temporarily closed down following an altercation. Nobody’s talking, but a vehicle with a blocked license plate departed the scene. Some kind of laminate sheen that reflects light back into the traffic cameras so we can’t read the plate. Guess where else it went?”
Jenna smiled. “The industrial park.”
“Mmm hmm,” the chief nodded. “The same make and model, with the same protective film. Entered the area a few hours before the heist, and left shortly after. You find out who was driving that truck, and you might just find your perp…”
***
Jenna walked the sidewalks of the south side neighborhoods, scantily clad in her halter top and skirt.
An old purple Cutlass Supreme drove by with large rimmed wheels and hydraulic suspension, its occupants whistling and cat-calling her as she kept her eyes forward, pretending to be shy with a smile until they drove off.
She walked past the bar with a big hand-written ‘Closed for maintenance’ sign on its locked screen door, stopping just in front of it to look up at its dilapidated second floor, where the owner no doubt lived.
She knocked several times, she even tried banging, but there was no answer. No sign of anyone inside, though she could probably guess that they were watching through the curtains.
“Damn…” she cursed, then looked off to her left down the street, where a couple of guys and some girls were listening to boom boxes on the front stoop of a small, red, three story apartment building.
And one of them, a mean looking Slavic guy with a black eye, wearing a gray sweatsuit was mean mugging her, averting his gaze once she caught him looking.
You don’t make eye contact in places like this, but it was too late. Jenna already knew the guy was a witness. They wouldn’t talk to cops, but a pretty woman dressed to kill? Different story.
Jenna preened her red hair and walked down the street to the apartment to the scowls of the women there, striking a sultry pose as she leaned on the guard rail.
“Hey boys, I’m looking for a friend,” she said with sweetness laced with a confident attitude. “Maybe you can help me.”
“Sell your pussy somewhere else, bitch,” said a wavy haired brunette chewing a piece of gum, who looked her up and down with disdain.
Jenna made fearless eye contact. “I’m not selling ass, I’m looking for a friend, like I said.”
“Do you know where you are?” the girlfriend questioned as she stepped closer alongside the second woman, a more voluptuous, threatening looking specimen.
Jenna took a step back.
“Sorry, I was looking for my friend who was at that bar the other night. Got into some trouble the night it closed down,” Jenna lied, as the only thing she knew was that there was a fight of some kind.
“Leave,” the Slavic man with the black eye.
“Hold up,” his girlfriend held up her hand and blocked his face while leaning sassily toward Jenna. “You mean Monica?”
“You do know her!” Jenna dove into the ruse.
“She don’t live here,” the local girl crossed her arms with a look of contempt. “I don’t know where she’s at, but you might wanna warn her that it’s on sight when I see her.”
Jenna pivoted to align herself with the witness. “Whatever she did, I’m sure she deserves it.”
“You don’t know? She kicked my man in the face! The bitch been stuntin’ all over Snapchat!”
“For real? She didn’t show me—and I gave her that phone!”
“Oh, now I know she’s on one. Caught my man tryin’ to look—almost gave him another black eye,” the woman took out her phone, then stepped beside Jenna to pull up her app.
And then she played a slideshow of a light-skinned African American girl smiling, topless, and covering her breasts with huge handfuls of cash.
With a mysterious dark-haired man.
There was another woman too, a caucasian blonde with a super short tomboy haircut.
She didn’t know which one was Monica, but she had more than enough. The video story was only a few hours out from being deleted, which fit within the time frame of the heist. The sudden influx of cash was a dead giveaway.
“You’re gonna kick her ass? I’m gonna kick her ass first!” Jenna performed. “She owes me a hundred bucks—and ?didn’t tell me she had a man!”
“He’s a freak,” said the Slav’s buddy, who was nursing his arm in a sling. “A goddamn Mutie.”
The guy with the black eye elbowed him for his outburst.
“A Mutie?” Jenna breathed. “Wait… that guy… he didn’t leave in a black truck, did he?”
“You know that asshole?” the Slavic man stepped into Jenna, causing his girlfriend to hide her phone screen away from him. “You might wanna tell me where he is… I owe him.”
Jenna quickly realized the connection.
Mutable hits a warehouse full of money and Ichor.
She didn’t have a motive, but she did have a suspect.
“I told her to stay away from him,” Jenna improvised, making eye contact with the Slav’s girlfriend as she stepped toward the sidewalk. “Sorry, I don’t mean to hold you. She never told me where she lived.”
The girlfriend spat, “Well, she ain’t been home—but if you wanna hit up her Grammie, she’s a block over…”