The Room Where It Happened

by Jason Letts

  Tera swallowed, wondering if she even could pull together all of the details in this heated moment. He was looking at her lips, and it crossed her mind that he may have been interested in them for more than what words would be coming out.

  “The first thing I heard was Kim’s father, Robert, screaming for help outside of his building. Before I go any further, you have to know I’ve known her family for a long time. So much of why I did this was because I want to find the killer, not get her family ruined as a result of their tragedy.”

  Brady appeared to be losing patience with her.

  “We’ll keep focused on this crime. It’s a murder investigation.”

  “Robert works as a painter and had come to check up on Kim after she hadn’t been responding to his calls. He took me into the apartment, which had a rank odor, and Kim’s nude body was on the bed, head turned painfully to the side over the shoulder, and a single shot through the temple. I’m sure Perry’s report can tell you more about the condition of her body.”

  Brady rubbed his eyes and shook his head.

  “No, that’s not it at all. I don’t want the details. What I want is the feeling. Tell me how it felt. Tell me what stood out. Skip the assumptions and the things that came after.”

  Tera squinted, trying to follow and give him what he wanted. She closed her eyes and tried to put herself back in that room at that moment.

  “It felt like her life had withered away long before she was killed. Her apartment and bedroom were clean enough, but it was still a miserable place to live. She was going nowhere and had nothing, not even the clothes on her back at the end, which were scattered about on the floor like they’d been torn off in a frenzy of passion. The room had a roll of bills in it that I guessed held about a thousand bucks, as well as some small amounts of coke, though she didn’t look at all like a user or a dealer.”

  “You’re getting off track.”

  “Sorry, I’m trying. The smell of fecal matter filled the air, making it hard to focus on anything. Her placid face had its eyes open, with little wisps of her dyed blonde hair now dyed with blood that was seeping along the sheets and dripping on the floor. It looked like something that happened at the spur of the moment, but it felt like a murder that was planned.”

  He looked at her hard and began to nod slowly.

  “OK, that’s where we’re starting from. Now let’s get it on paper. We’re going to need every detail of every action you took. It has to be like I was with you each step of the way.”

  She suppressed a grin and tried to produce the same level of control he did, but for once she was bursting with optimism. It was great she wouldn’t be handling Kim’s case alone anymore, but having the new hotshot detective on her side was going to be a game changer.

  Before long they’d had all of the loose documents and incomplete reports out on the table. Previously she’d thought it a tad silly that so much of the conflicts she’d had revolved around paperwork, but now she got it. Until it was all down and readable no one would know what had happened or what had been done about it.

  With Brady attentively listening and staying organized, she went through all of her steps. From returning to the bedroom to take prints to the meeting with Kendra that put her in the direction of Lawrence and Wayne, the forensic mortuary report, and the building owner, all the way to the drugs that she’d flushed, she handed it all over to him.

  He kept quiet mostly, requiring her to glance at the table to see what he was writing in order to have any idea what he was focused on at any given moment. His handwriting was a mess, making it hard to read. The man’s mind raced far faster than his hand.

  Even by the time her shift was ending and she could barely think straight, she had no real idea what Brady thought about any of it or if he still felt like they might be able to track down the killer, who she was more and more convinced was Wayne Chechy.

  “Head home and get some sleep,” he said when she was on the verge of nodding off. She wanted to stick it out with him and prove she was up to the task, but her heavy eyelids were making it clear she was more than useless.

  “I’m good. Maybe just some coffee.”

  “No,” he said in that firm way that made her listen. “Pack it in and we’ll get a fresh start tomorrow.”

  Getting thrown out didn’t put a good taste in her mouth, but mostly she just didn’t want to leave him. His relentlessness was energizing, even if she could barely muster the energy to stand up.

  “Alright then,” she said, leaving Kim’s phone with him and going to the door. He showed no signs of moving or even being tired. The last thing she ever wanted to be was a lightweight.

  As she collapsed into her car and followed through on a recent habit she’d been developing, which was checking for a text from Lawrence, she caught a serious second wind at the thought of what he’d done that was stronger than any cup of coffee.

  Her hands shook as her blazing eyes fixated on the last text he’d sent to her, that he’d hit her up when he got back. He hit her alright, and the betrayal was searing. If he’d wanted to drop her and take other women to bed, that was fine, but trying to ruin her over something as little as having to pass on a weekend trip seemed beyond petty. It was juvenile, and in retrospect a lot of his behavior was that of a clueless college boy who was just out for a good time.

  But he should’ve known better than this. Maybe she didn’t really know him, but he didn’t know her either. Keeping it together was so difficult, and her fingers started tapping on the screen seemingly without her permission.

  “How could you do that to me?” she wrote. It was extremely late, even for him, and the last thing she expected was a reply back. But the drumbeat in her head of him attacking her job continued to rise until she felt like she was going to split in two. She’d done bad things and she could feel another one coming on.

  Whether he was still awake or woke up to respond to her, she didn’t know.

  “I always wanted to screw a cop.”

  Her heart was beating out of her chest. She had a tendency to grind her teeth, and she was biting down so hard they must’ve been on the verge of breaking. The picture of how it would go was right before her. After going to his room, she would demand to see him. If he wouldn’t open the door, she could make the staff give her a key card. Then she’d been able to grab him and make him look into her face, which he never cared to see when they were having sex, and tell him that everything he’d done had failed and that now he would pay.

  The funny thing was that she could do anything to him and she would never have to answer for it. Steal everything he had? Put a bullet hole in the sprinter’s leg? Straight up stick the gun to his chest and pull the trigger? She could make up whatever story she wanted to justify it and the other officers would close ranks.

  The double standards of being a police officer in Chicago’s bad neighborhoods were becoming all too clear. Cause the department headaches by breaking its systems of routine? Unforgivable. Take justice and revenge into her own hands when it came to certain members of the public? Everyone would give her the benefit of the doubt because they’d want it themselves.

  But her car was still parked facing the precinct, and there was one person inside who would know the truth. Even if everyone else would bend over backwards to believe whatever she said, Brady alone would carry the truth that it had been pure retribution and an unjustified abuse of force. As much as it felt like it burned her heart to yearn to get back at Lawrence, she didn’t want to sink to that level.

  Before she could process a second thought about it, she deleted the message chain from him, and suddenly it was like he had never been in her life at all.

  Back at her apartment, she didn’t even change out of her uniform before slipping into bed and passing out.

  Her phone rang, and her first thought was that it was Lawrence trying to dig into her again. She didn’t think she’d be able to restrain herself a second time. Barely able to open her eyes to see, she picked it u
p.

  “What do you want?”

  “Is that how you answer the phone?” the voice on the other end asked with a note of astonishment. Tera lurched onto an elbow to see who it was. The number didn’t have an ID, but an inkling came to her.

  “Sorry. It just slipped out.”

  “You’re late. I told you we’re getting this going today.”

  “I thought you meant…‌my shift starts later.”

  “Not anymore. You’re done with all that. Get in here and let’s get cracking,” Brady said, and she sat up, wondering how she’d manage when she was still half asleep. But if he could do it on no sleep at all she wasn’t about to complain.

  “Right. I’m on my way,” she said, hoping the adrenaline would carry her. Brady had one more thing to say before ending the call.

  “We have a murder to solve.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Tera hadn’t seen the precinct and its stately brick facade and crest adorned glass doors in the morning since the day she’d been hired. The light made it look different, more cheerful and inviting, and she wondered if being around at night so much had dampened her enthusiasm.

  Coffee coursing through her veins, she parked and went to the front, where Brady was seated on the steps. Even though he had on the same suit and skinny black tie, one would’ve never known he’d gone the last night without a wink of sleep. As usual, he looked about ready to step into a photo shoot.

  The detective got up and started leading her back to the lot, and for once she was able to pass by the row of squad cars and get into one of the unmarked black sedans. It was so unassuming that her uniform seemed out of place in it.

  “Yesterday was for bookkeeping. Today the hunt begins,” he said, putting the vehicle in drive and cruising out of the lot.

  Considering how much time she’d spent riding around, she knew the roads by heart, but the route he was taking made no sense.

  “Kim’s apartment is back that way.”

  “We’ll get there. Our first stop is Clearwater Bank,” he said. She jerked her head in his direction.

  “What? Why? I already talked to them and they didn’t have anything that would help.”

  “That’s because they didn’t know what they should be looking for.”

  Tera sat back in her seat, trying to think of what she’d overlooked that made this the best place to start. It was humbling to know she’d missed something that may have been relatively obvious and important. Maybe hanging around with Brady would give her a chance to pick up a few things and get better. With experience like this, she might even want to go back to school and finish a bachelor’s degree.

  Her old duties and responsibilities were already looking mundane, but if she wanted to move up she’d need to start being able to figure these things out correctly. What had she botched? Kim worked at the bank as a tele-representative. Wayne Chechy was their lead suspect. When it hit her, it was hard to cut herself some slack and not feel like she’d let herself down.

  “When Wayne was saying in the texts that he’d call Kim, he meant that he’d call her at work!”

  Brady didn’t need to give her a pat on the back or a cookie. As much as she should’ve figured that out earlier, it still got her excited that she was managing to put it together. The best part would be that all of Kim’s work calls would’ve been recorded, and there was no telling how many calls between her and Wayne were sitting there waiting for them.

  When they arrived at the bank, which was smack dab in the middle of a heavily commercial area, they found the place to only have a couple of tellers and a manager around.

  “I don’t know if you remember, Mr. Dales, but I spoke to you briefly on the phone about Kim Parkinson,” Tera said to a manager who looked well past the usual retirement age with his gray hair and wrinkly, spotty skin.

  “Of course,” the man said. “We still feel terribly about her. What a shame.”

  “We think that the killer might’ve been contacting her at work, and we’re hoping you might have records of her calls available for us to go through.”

  Mr. Dales’s eyes widened as if Brady had told him the killer was lurking in the building at that very moment.

  “Right this way,” he said, moving more spryly than Tera would’ve thought possible. “We’ve got recordings of every call she’s ever taken in two years of working with us. There’s got to be tens of thousands.”

  The number was daunting, and she wondered how they’d manage to sort through it all, but something else struck her as well.

  “Is it normally so quiet around here?” she asked.

  “We really do most of our business online. That’s the way of it these days. But come into this office. You won’t be disturbed if you want to check through the records with this computer. The metadata is pretty good. Each file has the rep name, time, and date right on it. Let me know if you need anything else,” Mr. Dales said.

  “That’s extremely helpful,” Brady replied, settling down in the chair while Tera took the one on the other side of the desk. Some long shades partially obscured the cars whipping by on the road outside. The manager closed the door behind him, and they started to look over the files.

  “He’s got a brusque voice and a tendency to jumble his words. A little bit of a twang to it, not like you’d expect from a native Chicagoan. I’ll know it when I hear it,” Tera said.

  “That’s good, because I’ve certainly never heard it,” Brady added. “It looks like the calls are divided into folders by month, and the texts with Chechy don’t stretch back before May, so we shouldn’t have to wade through every call she’s ever made. I’m hoping we’ll be able to narrow things down further by matching the texts saying he’ll call to the dates in the file names, though we will want to check all of them in this range in case there are any unannounced calls. Hopefully something gives us an idea of what was going on between them that these mostly dirty texts don’t provide. Might as well start with this one.”

  When Brady clicked on the file for the very last call that Kim made on the job, it was immediately clear that it wasn’t one involving Chechy. But hearing her voice brought a flood of memories back to Tera. Sure, she was talking about someone who was checking on a deposited check, but that angelic voice was a sudden link to their late-night adventures. Kim could’ve been a singer, it seemed to Tera right then.

  As usual, Brady was focused on other things.

  “See, this is gold. Every call opens up with a verification of the caller’s name and phone number. I’m not saying this won’t take a while, but since we’ve got his number on Kim’s phone to match it there’s no way we’ll miss him.”

  They pinpointed one of the dates when Chechy said he’d call and began going through Kim’s recordings after that time. After flipping through about twenty calls, they had a hit. Hearing Wayne’s voice made Tera tense up, and even though the conversation they were listening to seemed calm and normal, she had a hard time not reading into it as a prelude to a murder.

  “He’s calling in for information about using his mobile banking app? Doesn’t that strike you as a little bit weird? Who does that?” Tera asked.

  Brady held up a finger and the listened to the remainder of the call. She kept waiting for the conversation to shift into something personal or register some emotion, but it never did. What was odd was that Kim seemed to misspeak a number of times as if she were forgetting which words to say.

  “It is strange. Some of these lines in particular are throwing me off,” Brady said. “Let’s listen to it again.”

  This time Tera watched Brady carefully as the recording played once more. His hand over his mouth and his eyes peering at a bare spot on the desk, she could just imagine the gears in his head turning furiously. When it was over, he looked at her.

  “At least in my memory, she never had a problem speaking. And some of these things are just so basic. It’s like she’s pretending that English isn’t her native language.”

  “Let’s see if we ca
n find some more.”

  They continued to listen, but only calls with Wayne ever had the kinds of weird incorrect words and halting speech patterns that caught their attention. They immediately noticed that Chechy always called about the same thing as well. Brady was writing things down and segregating the files with the suspect, but Tera was closing in on an idea.

  “They’re speaking in some kind of code,” Tera said. That’s when a sensation of dread took over her heart. Whatever scheme Chechy was involved with that cost Kim her life, she was complicit in it.

  “It’ll take some more analysis, but I think I’m right that she was feeding him login credentials,” Brady said when evidently Tera distracted him from the screen.

  “I can’t believe it,” Tera said. She’d had plenty of causes to get emotional lately, but this one was too much to hold back. After putting everything at risk for her old friend, she was rewarded by being the first to realize that this girl whose memory she cherished was a willful participant in an identity theft and bank fraud scheme.

  That money sitting in her bedroom drawer, was that her cut for robbing people? It sure looked like it. For Tera, it felt like she was losing Kim all over again. First she lost her life, then she lost her literal innocence. It startled Tera when she felt Brady’s hand on hers on the desk. She hadn’t even noticed him get up and move over to her.

  “Tera, I’m sorry,” he said softly, and his sympathy that should’ve been unnecessary ushered in another convulsion in her chest. Why couldn’t she just have a normal conversation with this handsome detective where she didn’t end up getting betrayed by somebody close to her?

  “No, it’s fine,” she said, trying to be strong. “We follow the facts where they lead.”

  “No.” He was firmer this time, almost snapping at her. “I believe you when you said she was a great girl, and this doesn’t have to change that. Don’t let somebody’s worst moment consume your judgment of them. Let’s keep going.”