The Room Where It Happened

by Jason Letts

  “It’s another way to launder the money, sort of like Bitcoin, which criminals use for the anonymity. Collectibles. Chechy takes his stolen money, pours it into old Pokemon trading cards from the late 90’s and early 2000’s. It’s something that can be sold later off the books for cash, and in the meantime the value of this stuff can jump dramatically. Some of these boxes are worth thirty thousand a piece. There could be a million dollars in goods here.”

  “I never would’ve imagined. He managed to juggle quite a few schemes. A real entrepreneur,” Tera said. “Kind of a shame it was all crooked.”

  A pair of squad cars arrived, one of them happening to carry her erstwhile partner Harold Dreck, who Tera suspected she’d soon be returning to along with the night shifts. She declined an offer for medical treatment and instead retrieved her shoes and spent some time talking the other officers through what happened.

  A mountain of paperwork awaited her in the morning, as did plenty of aches and pains, but before she got a ride home she took a long moment staring at the moon’s reflection against the great lake. If only Chechy had confessed she wouldn’t have this terrible knot of tension balled up in her center.

  CHAPTER 9

  Tera didn’t need to tell Brady that there had been problems with his approach to the stakeout. Lieutenant Sanders did that for her.

  “This was an unmitigated disaster. Foolish. Reckless. Careless. I can’t imagine what you were thinking deciding to go in on the fly. Watching from a distance was iffy at best,” Sanders said to both of them in his office. Behind him were plaques and accolades hung up from years of service. He also had plenty of pictures of his beautiful family, the existence of which was more compelling to Tera than his awards. He’d lived police work and made a life out of it.

  “I completely understand and I take full responsibility. It got out of hand,” Brady said from the seat beside Tera. They’d been called in after spending enough time on paperwork that her hand ached and she had pen smeared all over it.

  This wasn’t the typical Sanders in chewing-people-out mode that she’d seen. Mostly he seemed disappointed.

  “That doesn’t matter and in some ways only makes it worse. If that’s how I put it in a press conference, it makes it sound like we were out of control.”

  “Right,” Brady said, chastened in a way she’d never seen before.

  “And it didn’t matter that they may have deserved it for the broad scheme emerging, or the murder, or that they fought back. This isn’t how we do things, and having a couple of officers playing Lone Ranger when it results in three casualties in our community raises tensions and makes it look like we’re passing our own death sentences,” Sanders said.

  As much as Sanders had a reputation for being intimidating, after last night Tera felt different, like she could trust she had something to say no matter who she was talking to.

  “I watched them roll the car into the lake. All of them were hardened criminals, not exactly members of the community that too many people outside their co-conspirators are going to mourn,” she said.

  Sanders took a deep breath, and she was grateful when he didn’t argue with anything she said.

  “Look, I get it. We’re human and we’re not able to sit there and read our procedural manuals in the heat of the moment. If I can be candid for a moment, I don’t want law enforcement robots who rigidly adhere to guidelines one hundred percent of the time. You know why? They’d miss things. An officer’s intuition and ingenuity are the best assets we have, even when they lead us into a gray area.

  “But this is over the line and I’d be doing you a disservice if I let you get away from this scot free. Detective Lance, I’m putting you on probation. Once these cases are wrapped up and shelved, you’ll be getting guidance from Detective Stetman on your next steps. I think it’s fair to say they didn’t teach you everything at Yale.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Tera saw Brady give him a begrudging nod. Now that he’d gotten some of the flack he deserved, she felt she could go back to having a respectful and appropriate appreciation of him. And that included being there for him when he’d been knocked down.

  “What about me?” she asked Sanders. “If he’s on probation and I’m the one who took down the three targets, I should probably be fired, right?”

  Before last night she never would’ve made a flippant comment like that, but after emerging from that water the feeling that she could do anything extended even to putting her livelihood on the line when it came to defending her behavior. If he wanted to ream her out, she’d be able to take it without unraveling.

  A curious crinkle came to the man’s eye.

  “Officer Caldera, for bailing out his hide, if you keep that up you might just find yourself in line for a promotion,” he said, flicking a thumb to get them both moving out of his office.

  Tera appreciated the thought, but she had a better plan to move up the ladder than wait for an unlikely chance that Brady would screw up again and need to be saved.

  When they left the office and were back in the hall, Brady stopped to say something but seemed to have trouble getting the words out. Tera wasn’t aware that he was capable of awkwardness.

  “You really did come through there in a big way,” he said, and it was nice to hear a comment from him about her that was a little more substantive than that she had been wet.

  “Just doing my job,” she said, taking it in stride and turning away, even though the compliment gave her a warm and fuzzy feeling. Brady watched her walk the entire way down the hall until she veered into the office. Now if only she could draw a reaction like that out of a guy who didn’t have a girlfriend.

  Tera passed Olivia, who was carrying around an empty ticket pad, without a word and returned to her desk to continue her paperwork. It was getting late in the day, and before long she was supposed to be out on her beat with Harold Dreck as if all of the work she’d done on Kim’s case was a glimpse of a better life that had been taken away with the snap of someone’s fingers.

  When Dreck saw her as they were heading out, his eyes glossed right over her as if what he’d seen of her the previous night hadn’t even registered. That wouldn’t stand for long. As the squad car approached Kim’s neighborhood, Tera felt the need to visit the apartment one more time.

  “Pull over here,” she said, pointing to a convenience store on the corner where they could park the vehicle out of sight. Dreck looked at her like she had three heads.

  “You must be crazy,” he said. “You remember what happened to Johnny.”

  “Then that should give you more incentive to get out of the car. We’re not being paid to drive around counting potholes in the road,” she said. His puffy fingers clenched the wheel.

  “I don’t think so,” he said with a smarmy grin smacking of an unjustified sense of superiority.

  “Pull the car over right now or I’ll radio in about you shirking your responsibilities. I’ve seen enough of how you operate in the last week or so that I’ll need extra pages in the reports to document all of your negligence and dereliction of duty. And I won’t just be taking them to the lieutenant or the main office. The press will get a hold of them and they’ll know the only place you’re keeping safe is the Dunkin Donuts on Kedzie Ave.”

  His mouth gaped open, but he came around and turned the wheel.

  “Fine,” he said, pulling into the space she pointed to. When they got out of the vehicle, he looked around like he’d never seen the area before. She was so tired of cowards.

  “Keep up.”

  They walked along the streets slower than Tera would’ve liked, but no one gave them any trouble. The basketball courts and the skating area at Duggan’s Park beneath the highway underpass were quiet tonight. They passed some guys playing cards on a stoop and Tera was sure that Dreck would end up dying from a heart attack.

  Turning a corner, they came to Kim’s building, and Tera’s eyes immediately went to her deceased friend’s window, which was dark as always.r />
  “What are we doing here?” Dreck asked when she stepped onto the stoop. Her hand fished into her pocket for the key.

  “Just having another look around. This is the scene of the crime for that murder investigation,” she said.

  In her mind she tried to imagine everything that must’ve happened that Sunday night. Wayne Chechy sneaked in after dark with the same run-of-the-mill gun he’d pulled on Tera, ready to give Kim an ultimatum about helping him gain access to more bank accounts. He’d already found another girl to hookup with but Meghan didn’t have the same connections Kim did.

  With gloves on, he didn’t think twice about handling the railing on his way up. Maybe he considered what he’d do to her if she adamantly refused, but there was a strong possibility he expected her to give in and then got angry and did something rash when she didn’t. He felt like he needed it to get ahead.

  Tera opened the apartment door and led Dreck inside. His girth didn’t leave much room to maneuver, and he ended up hovering in the kitchen much like Kim’s father did the night he discovered her body. Things like the laptop and money had been taken away into evidence, leaving personal effects, the dresser desk and the bare mattress.

  As she thought through what must’ve taken place in the room where it happened, things got hazier for Tera. He gave her the money. Kim took off her clothes. Wayne shot her in the head evidently before following through with sex. The connection between those things was unclear. Perhaps Wayne had decided to demand a little more from Kim before handing over the money, like her body, but then something disturbed them.

  Loud music from the apartment above made it hard to think, just like it may have made it difficult to hear the sound of the gunshot from a little pistol. She revised her speculation about what had happened. Chechy gave Kim her money. The subject of the bank scheme may not have even come up. He could’ve already decided that he’d take her for one more ride, willing or not. But after he stripped off her clothes, scattering them around the room, he realized that not having a condom would’ve left him exposed, so he went ahead and shot her to put an end to it and cover his tracks.

  “Most people don’t go back to crime scenes once they’ve already been solved,” Dreck said from the kitchen. His implication that she was having doubts was regrettably prescient.

  “I wish I had all of the details straight,” she said, sighing. “But since he died without confessing there are gaps in the story that can only be left up to conjecture.”

  Dreck’s chuckling weirdly reminded Tera of the sound of a hungry, begging dog.

  “It’d be nice if the criminals always left time to walk us through everything they did, but it doesn’t work like that. After a couple years you get used to being comfortable with knowing enough to remove the reasonable doubt even if you can’t pinpoint what was happening every second.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” she said, wondering how long it would take her to come to peace with it.

  Coming back to Kim’s apartment was beginning to look like a mistake, like picking a scab and reopening a wound that was trying to heal. After leaving, she made Dreck walk a few more blocks, they responded to a domestic violence incident in the area, and then she allowed her partner to retreat to the safety of the squad car for the remainder of their shift.

  When she finally got back to her apartment in the wee hours of the morning, with the entire weekend in front of her, it was difficult for her to remember that she had a life outside of work. A jam-packed week that felt like a month made her offers to spend the weekend that was now here on a trip with Lawrence seem like it must’ve happened in a past life.

  While she still did the normal things like visiting her mother and grocery shopping, she spent quite a bit of her time researching the criminal justice program at Illinois State that could give her a degree helpful for becoming a detective. The college’s promotional videos were full of smiling, happy, attractive young people who didn’t need to financially support their mothers and were able to pursue relationships with each other without worrying about if they might actually be related.

  After more research, she was able to determine that most if not all of her credits from her associate’s degree would transfer, but there was still the matter of the cost. Even if she skipped student housing and a meal plan, opting in to mostly online courses, the tuition, fees, and price of textbooks still made the prospect of figuring anything out daunting.

  The big unknown was whether she could take out enough in loans to cover those costs and handle her mother’s rent, offsetting what she would lose in income from her job when she left it. Saying goodbye to Sanders and Olivia didn’t strike her as something that would be an emotionally fraught exchange, but she had to admit that having Brady around made work a lot more interesting and was propelling her to consider things she’d never before imagined for herself.

  By the time Monday rolled around, she was on the fence about whether she could make college work, but she was more determined than ever to put to rest the question of if her father, Nathan Hollister, and Brady’s father, Evan Iger, were the same person.

  Despite working for the city, Tera never liked going to city hall and avoided it whenever possible. There was something about growing up in her neighborhood that ingrained feelings in everyone that they weren’t wanted or weren’t really a part of the city. Even in a cop’s uniform, she felt like she was getting judging looks and naked hostility from the officials walking into the mammoth stone building with its towering pillars reaching up to the top floors and the flags waving by the door.

  Inside, she navigated the hallways with the lights glinting off the floors and the archways to the Streets & Sanitation Department that administered the city’s youth work program, which helped attend to the city’s forestry needs, remove graffiti, collect garbage, and handle rodents and other pests. Considering it was hard to look down a street in the city and not find garbage piled up somewhere on it, they could never get the level of help they needed.

  As she entered the office and noticed about twenty clerical workers at desks administering the department, someone at a reception counter called her over. Although in most circumstances wearing her uniform seemed to be a hindrance, in this case she hoped it would inspire someone to take her delving into the past a little more seriously.

  “Hi, I spoke to someone on the phone last week about researching an individual who previously participated in the youth work program, and she recommended that I come in and have a look at the archives.”

  The young man who may himself have been part of that program and seemed wary that cops were looking into it took a moment to respond.

  “I think I know who you were probably talking to. Right this way,” he said, getting up and leading Tera back through the office. A woman in a circular desk by a window was on the phone and held up a finger for them to wait, giving Tera a chance to look around and wonder how many miles of streets these people were responsible for keeping clean. No wonder the condition of the city in many parts of the city felt neglected.

  “What can I help you with?” the older lady with glasses asked. A nameplate on her desk read Gloria Stein. The man from the front desk had already vanished.

  “Hi, I called somebody here asking about a participant in the youth work program around 2002 by the name of Evan Iger. I’m trying to find any documentation you might have about him, perhaps any photographs. I believe he’d be roughly five foot eight and under two hundred pounds with flat black hair,” she said, wondering if Gloria would notice that the person she was describing had some resemblance to herself.

  The woman got up from her seat and raised a section of the desk in order to exit.

  “There’s only one way to see what we have. The archives are over this way,” she said, leading Tera off to the left and through a narrow door that deceptively opened into a rather large room lined with filing cabinets stacked head high. Judging by the volume of files, the room may well have contained data going back a century,
and once they started digging in it seemed it would take that long to pinpoint anything from the year they wanted.

  “Here we go,” Gloria went on. “We do get about a million service requests a year and we only started logging them electronically a few years ago. Some of them get tossed, but a lot are what’s clogging up the drawers. Youth works. Youth works. Here we go. Probably not too many pictures. This isn’t a summer camp.”

  She pulled out a file that was about six inches thick that had the name of the program scribbled in faded pencil along the tab. Tera had kind of been hoping for something quick and easy, but when Gloria handed her the file it became clear to Tera that the task of finding any relevant information would be exactly as fast as she was able to do it herself.

  “Thanks,” Tera said, trying to be optimistic. This was less than two decades ago, not the stone age or anything. Gloria gave her a look.

  “There’s nothing we should be concerned about with this person, is there? Is anybody at risk?”

  “Probably just me. But no, this isn’t really part of an investigation and no one’s in danger. I’m trying to uncover whether or not my father was using a fake name for a while,” she said, being atypically forthcoming now that she didn’t care what anything thought about what she was doing.

  “He could’ve at least picked a flashier name than Evan Iger if he was going to alight under a pseudonym. I would’ve gone with something like Electra Duskmaiden and posed as an amnesia-struck debutante who waltzed around town believing she was from the seventeenth century. Anyway, good luck.”

  Tera raised an eyebrow, thinking as Gloria left that if things didn’t work out with the law enforcement end of things maybe she’d try to get a job here if everyone was spinning quirky tales like that. But for right now she plopped down on the floor with her massive file and tried to dig into it without spilling the papers everywhere.