“Hello there, Chief Decker,” the assistant said with a smile in her voice. “I’ll put the Governor through now. Nice to speak to you again.”
“Thank you, Cassandra,” he said, a grin spreading across his face.
He leaned back in his chair, the damn thing screeching like a pregnant crow. If I wasn’t leaving in a month, I’d throw this thing out the window, he thought. He propped his feet on the corner of his desk and waited for Cruz to pick up.
“Felton,” he boomed, “How the hell are you, buddy?”
Same line. Same booming voice. Same distinct lack of any ethnic accent. A polished politician with Latin heritage. He was everything a voter could want, whether they be red or blue.
“Better than I should, given the sad state of funding in this town,” Felton said.
He said it with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek. As a rule, the funding for their department was reasonable and Cruz never accepted any bills that would put them in the red. But the raises over the last few years had crawled down into decimal point increments. Felton couldn’t complain. He was going to retire with the full pension and more than enough in savings to finally get that Cape Dory Cutter he’d been looking at down at the Landings Harbor Marina. Jane had forbidden it, but she’d been gone for more than a year and …
“Decker?” Cruz’s voice shook him out of his thoughts. “Did you get any of that? Hell, I knew you were losing your hearing, but— “
“I heard you, Jerry,” he lied, counting on the Governor to reiterate. “I’m on it.”
“Good, good,” he said. “And for the record, I’m working on increasing that funding.”
“Funding?”
“You didn’t hear me, did you, Felton?” Cruz laughed. “Look, there are a ton of files in your fine city that are still technically open. Without proof that we can close cases, I can’t secure the federal funds. Got it? Get someone to go through the files. Look them over. Make sure we did our due diligence. And if we did, close the darn things.”
Felton knew there were quite a few of those cold cases stored beneath his police department, but if you dwelled on the past too much in this line of work, you’d never get a good night’s sleep—not that he’d had ever had one, but he’d heard about such things.
“Isn’t that new system up and running? Everything going digital and all, right?” The Governor asked.
“It is,” Decker said. He’d been hoping to retire before they made the department go through the massive digital overhaul to the system. Old dog, new tricks sort of thing.
“Well, get a detective on the files. Just skim it. Check the P’s and Q’s,” Cruz said. “Then we’ll do a quick report of closed cases, over and done. And you and I can sail off into the sunset, my friend.”
Decker hung up and took a deep breath. He didn’t have the bandwidth or the manpower for this revolution in record keeping. As he sat contemplating how to handle this, he saw Rick waddling down the hall, shoving a powdered doughnut into his mouth.
“Hey, Rick,” he shouted at his glass door. The portly detective stopped short and pushed into the office, breathing harder than he should have been.
“What’s the new girl doing these days?” He asked as Rick finished the doughnut and licked his fingers.
“She’s been working on that social media bulls— “
Decker held up a hand to stop him. “I need to see her. I have an assignment for her.”
Rick’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “An assignment? Geez, chief, the girl can barely tie her shoes without somebody holding her hand.”
“Not to worry,” the chief said. “She can’t do any harm on this one.”
3
Murder Files
Amber Cross walked into the office, Fat Rick ushering her along like a child. She could smell him already and it wasn’t even noon. He stood there, lurking in the doorway as she sat down across the desk from Chief Decker.
“That’ll be all, detective,” he said. “Close the door on your way out.”
The man opened his mouth to say something, but the chief pointed a firm finger out the door. Rick closed it a little harder than he should’ve and stomped down the hall.
“Hello, Miss Cross,” Decker said, his tone shifting from dismissive to fatherly in two seconds flat. “How’s our little project workin’ out these days?”
The chief really believed in the K.E.Y.S. program, even if it was more of a babysitting assignment for Amber. He had come through his career knowing in his heart that policing crime was easier if the department was engaged in the community. Amber thought she would be hard pressed to find a Savannah local who didn’t know and respect the man, even in the roughest parts of town.
“It’s going well, sir. I just put up three new articles today ahead of the heat wave coming this weekend,” she said. “Standard stuff really. Don’t leave your kids in the car. Don’t leave your pets in the car. Limit your time outside during the hours of two and five.”
“Uh huh,” Decker nodded, his eyes glazing over. “Well, if you’ve got some time, I’ve got somethin’ I need you on right away.”
“Of course, sir.”
He slid a single key on a ring toward her. She picked it up and flipped it over in her fingers. Squinting her eyes, she asked, “What’s this, sir?”
“It’s the key to the basement.”
“Basement?”
She had worked in the Savannah Police Department for a year and had never heard anything about a basement. She decided to put that fact away and pretend she knew exactly what the chief was talking about.
“That’s right,” he said, clucking his tongue on the roof of his mouth. “Ain’t nothin’ down there but the file room. Boxes and boxes of the stuff that nobody has looked at in years.”
“Okay. And?”
“We just got a new computer system that’s gonna do away with all that,” Decker said. “No paper anymore. All digitized and stored in a cloud somewhere offsite.”
Amber was still confused as to why the chief was giving her the key to this mysterious file room. But she thought it was in her best interest to play along.
“Sounds reasonable.”
“Most of what’s down there is the closed file case record,” he said, pointing his finger at the floor. “Stuff we gotta keep for future reference, just in case there’s an appeal, or new evidence, or a cross-department request.”
“I see,” Amber said, seeing where this was going. “And you want me to go clean up down there.”
Chief Decker smiled. “In a manner of speaking, yes.”
A long silence passed between them. Amber had the distinct impression that the chief was considering what to say next, an odd thing for the chief to do. She had never known him to be at a loss for words.
“Pull the files. Scan them. Double—no—triple check to be sure the complete file is stored in the new system, then we’ll get a truck to put those paper files on and get them over to the county storage facility.”
Amber twisted the key on the ring between her fingers and sighed. “Clean up the basement. Got it, chief.”
She stood and walked toward the door.
“Officer Cross,” the chief said, “That’s not the whole assignment.”
Amber turned around to see the chief wearing an odd expression. The look of a man revealing to his wife that he’d had an affair. Guilt was written across the man’s face.
“I’m listening, sir.”
“Dig up the oldest case files first.”
“The oldest ones. Yes, sir.”
She waited for him to say more, but he apparently needed prompting. “Okay, and when I find them?”
He licked his lips and rubbed his hands together. “I need you to go through them and write a follow-up report. Lot of big files, probably twenty or more.”
“Yes, sir. Is there something going on with these cases?”
More hesitation.
“Just throw together a report that summarizes the important points in
the case. Reiterate the validity of what we’ve already done and call it a day. Summarize it, scan it, and get the box on the truck. I need those cases closed.”
Amber could tell something was bothering the chief. He wasn’t telling her everything.
“What’s this all about?” She asked.
“Federal funding.” Decker leaned back in his chair, which squeaked so loud that it made the hair stand up on the back of Amber’s neck. “They don’t want to keep paying us if we have too many unsolved cases growing mold in the basement.”
“And so, we’re doing a new report?” Amber asked. “To close some of them? But isn’t that a bit unethical?”
The chief slammed his fist down on his desk so hard that his coffee cup fell over, spilling out the black ooze left over from his morning coffee. “I am the chief of this department and you will do as I say or you will be looking for another job, Miss Cross. Am I clear?”
Amber felt her bottom lip quiver. She bit it from the inside to hold it steady. “Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”
She stood and hurried toward the door so he wouldn’t see the tears stinging her eyes. When her hand touched the door, he said, “Amber, look … I’m sorry. It’s just that … well, some powerful people are leaning on the Governor to clear our case load. It’s all about funding. What I need is a report for a few of these cases that shows we did our job and we did all we could. Don’t reinvent the wheel here.”
She nodded and walked into the hall without a word not knowing that her whole world was about to change.
4
Into the Rabbit Hole
The basement was worse than Amber feared. It wasn’t a lower level office built underground. No, it was a concrete block cellar. The putrid smell of must and mold was as thick as the fog that rolled down the Savannah River every morning at dawn. A single, yellow bulb, that looked as if it was on its last flicker, sent beams of sickly, pale light dancing between inky black shadows throughout the unfinished room. Along one wall stood a sentry row of rusted, steel filing cabinets. On the walls to the right and left of them, someone had built Jenga-worthy stacks of long cardboard boxes with ancient Sharpie marker inscriptions on the ends. It reminded Amber of the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the holy relic containing the Ten Commandments is wheeled into a massive warehouse overflowing with wooden crates and buried again.
She used the flashlight on her cellphone to check out the boxes closest to her. One was missing its top and she leaned over to look inside. Something about the size of an apple and fuzzy scurried out of the box, leaped onto her hand and ran across her shoulders. She screamed as it jumped to the rail beside the stairs and raced up into the light and disappeared.
“Mouse,” she whispered, fighting to control her breathing and slow her pulse. “Just a mouse.”
She shook the box hard to scare away any more creatures hiding inside and when she was satisfied there weren’t anymore, she peered over the edge. The mouse had made a nice nest inside the box, using the shredded documents for its bed. So much for digitizing those, Amber thought.
She waved her light across the ends of the boxes and figured out that the scribblings on the end were a code of dates and case numbers jammed together. It took some time studying the inscriptions, but she finally deduced that the number 2015320-RC-14-983787 referenced the date of March 20th, 2015, for Rusty Collierville, case number 14-983787. She also found that the larger files were kept in the boxes, while the smaller ones were jammed haphazardly into the filing cabinets. Even with thorough examination, she could not find any sort of system of organization for any of the files.
She spent the better part of the day just pushing boxes back and forth, into stacks roughly based on what year the case was filed, and then alphabetically. The room had been chilly when she had come down earlier in the day, but now it was growing hot and the air was thick. Her lungs ached and she wondered what kind of long-term damage she might be doing to them in the rank basement file room.
She glanced down at her watch. “Christ, its already after four o’clock?” Her stomach growled in complaint and she realized she hadn’t even taken a lunch break. She pulled herself up from the floor, her back and knees resisting in painful knots. The room lurched and spun as she did. The edges of her vision went dark and threatened to close in around her.
When she woke up, she found that she wasn’t in the basement anymore. She sat up abruptly. She also wasn’t in the police department either. In fact, glancing around, she realized she was in a completely unfamiliar room. The walls were dark mahogany and smelled faintly of … banana and cherry? Pipe smoke, she thought. The room smelled like pipe smoke. Tall shelves of leather-bound books lined the wall to her right. She looked down to see that she was sitting on a burgundy settee with dangling antique gold tassels. Brass nail-heads lined the couch’s gentle sloping arms and a pair of matching embroidered pillows with woven tapestry images of foxes and hounds lay where her head had been.
“Where the hell am I?” She said to the empty room.
“Why, you are in my office, young lady,” a voice behind her said, startling her so badly that she fell off the settee. “Where else would you be?”
She jumped up and her joints that had suffered from inaction in the cold, dark file room creaked and moaned with the effort. When did I get so old?
“Last thing I remember, I was down in the— “
“That dreadful cellar where they keep the old ghosts of guilt and innocence over at the revered and much-lauded Savannah Police Department,” the man interrupted her. “I know. I watched with great interest, and I must admit, a bit of mirth, as the portly Officer Thompson carried you up from the depths. He was about as pink and bloated as a prize-winning pig headed for slaughter.”
Amber couldn’t help but smile at the perfectly accurate description of Fat Rick.
“Apparently, your chief of police decided to get you up and out of there with the box you were working on for some fresh air. I just happened to be passing through and I suggested that perhaps your digitizing work could be performed here—the space requirements of your task somewhat exceeding the space in the Savannah Police Department. And, here you are. With me.”
The man, tall, lanky, and impossibly skinny stood in the doorway of the room with his hands crossed behind his back. His pale blue suit looked as if it was still on its hanger, draped across nothing more than the thin collarbones jutting out from below his neck. A snow-white beard, just a day away from being unkempt, grew on the man’s pale face under rosy, whiskey-veined cheeks. A cream-colored straw Fedora sat on the back of his head, cocked at an angle that suggested he was a fan of Humphrey Bogart, or perhaps that he just didn’t care anymore.
“Do I know you?” She asked, as a tickle of recognition wandered across her brain.
“Young lady,” he said, stepping into the room, “I believe everyone in the counties of Effingham, Bryan, Liberty, Long, McIntosh, Glynn, and naturally, Chatham knows who I am. In fact, I believe they may know me as far away as Telfair and Wheeler … maybe even Briggs.”
He stretched out a hand to her and she saw he had a cane in the other, stabilizing himself. “Minter Tweed,” he said, showing pearly-white teeth. Ah, now she recognized him. He was famous, or rather, infamous in the antebellum town of Savannah and occasionally trolled the police department for potential clients.
A few minutes later, she was sitting in a high-backed leather armchair across from Minter Tweed’s heavy, but not ostentatious mahogany desk that might have come off the Titanic. She could easily imagine Winston Churchill sitting behind it, with a cigar jammed in his jaw. The office was massive. A huge conference table with eight chairs arranged around it gleamed in the sunlight that poured into ten-foot-tall floor to ceiling windows. Whitewashed plantation shutters were opened just enough to allow the sun to draw long, ever-widening bands of light along the forest green plush carpet. French doors opened out onto a balcony that overlooked a picturesque city square.
Tweed
was carefully placing ice cubes in two crystal tumblers with sterling silver tongs. He poured a dark brown liquid from a pitcher filling each glass half way. He handed one to Amber.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m on duty,” she said, holding up one hand.
“You don’t drink iced tea on duty, Miss Cross?” His smile was infectious and his eyes twinkled. The man reminded her of Santa. Anorexic Santa. He held out a bowl with several lemon slices that had been coated with sugar. “Care to have a lemon?”
She took the glass and two lemons. She squeezed them gently into the tea and then plopped them in. The tea was exquisitely sweet with exactly the perfect amount of tartness. It flowed over her tongue like liquid silk.
“Jesus Christ that’s good tea,” Amber exclaimed, then covered her mouth at her outburst.
“It is damn fine tea,” he grinned, taking a small bottle of bourbon from the bar behind him and filling his glass up to the rim. “But you can just call me Minter.”
She drank the tea faster than she had meant to and he filled it up again.
“It’s a Darjeeling blend, fruity and floral on its own, but I like to add a bit of sugar and lemon.”
“And bourbon, I see,” she said, holding her glass up as if to toast.
“Only when I’m working,” He winked at her and drained his glass. She could swear she’d seen another mischievous twinkle in the man’s eyes. Who is this guy? She thought.
He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. They were as thin as the rest of him and put her in mind of a praying mantis.
“Well now, Miss Cross, we have a lovely late afternoon ahead of us. Shall we take a look at the moldy mess of files they brought over with you?”
His voice was something like the old PBS painter, Bob Ross, and she was momentarily lulled by his lazy, Georgia native accent. Amber snapped to attention, sitting upright in her chair. The files. The Marcario Morales file. What was she supposed to do again? Tweed motioned to a spot on the floor beside the conference table. Three long cardboard boxes sat in a neat stack beside the conference table. On the end of the top box, the label read: 2010620-MM-14-4217399A. The one under that had the same long code then the letter B. The third one C.
Her Lost Alibi: A gripping suspense thriller. (An Amber Cross Thriller Book 1) Page 2