Burnout (Goosey Larsen Book 1)

by James Vachowski

  That sounded about right. Our solicitor never saw fit to take on any of our cases except the ones that got his picture splashed all over the front page. “Well, that’s the prosecution’s problem,” I said. “Once the missing are found, I wash my hands of the matter.”

  Jim smiled. “Not so, Goosey. If something like this went to trial, you’d probably be the star witness for the prosecution! I’ll bet they’d need you in the courtroom during the whole trial.”

  I broke out in a cold sweat at the thought of being stuck in the county courthouse for days, or even weeks at a time. I always hated showing up in court because it ate up most of my workday, and half the time the cases would just get continued anyway. On those rare occasions when the judge actually got around to holding a trial, the defendant would usually just get a slap on the wrist at the end of it all.

  I was about to accept my misfortune and walk inside the station when I saw Squealer pull his boxy old Crime Scene van into the parking lot. The car was actually nothing more than an old station wagon with a bubble light on the roof, but that jerk always made sure to call it a van, probably trying to sound like the shiny black SUVs they have on those detective shows. I swear, just looking at that guy was irritating to me since that little punk had no idea what it meant to be a real cop. He didn’t even have the sense to pull his kids’ car seats out of the back of his wagon before showing up to work.

  “Hey, Mike!” Squealer shouted. He jumped out of his wagon almost before it had stopped moving. I held my breath and imagined him getting caught under the tire and dragged for at least a few feet, but had no such luck. The little rat was almost hopping up and down, he was so excited. “I think we’ve got a break on this morning’s 07!”

  I rolled my eyes and tilted my head back in order to give Jim a look that said, This jerk can’t be serious. With the black mood I was in, I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to make Squealer look like an ass. “That’s fascinating, Squealer. Tell me, how exactly do you have a break on a suicide case? I thought the suspect and the victim were usually one and the same.”

  Jim chuckled discreetly into his arm, his gummy lips covered up by that raggy shirtsleeve. I took this as a sign of his approval, so I pressed on. “Tell me, whodunit? Gravity, or the pavement?”

  Squealer turned red and started to stutter. When he got nervous, that guy always sounded like a middle school kid searching for the nerve to ask a girl out on a date. “Well, n…no, I mean … um … that is, we m…m…might have a witness.”

  “A witness?” Jim growled. “Didn’t Sergeant Jenkins’ squad canvass the area already?”

  It sounded as if Big Jim wanted to get in on the act. I crossed my fingers and hoped he’d jump on Squealer with an old-school ass chewing since I hadn’t seen him go ballistic in a long time. If today was the day, I couldn’t think of any better target than Squealer.

  “Well, n…not exactly a witness, b…but I…I…”

  I was quickly running out of patience and cut him off. “How about you stop wasting everyone’s time and tell us exactly what you do have, Squealer? For real, do you have any idea how many open cases I have that need my attention?”

  Squealer was still red in the face when he turned back to me, but it was only a reddish-pink shade of embarrassment. I wanted to see a shade that was more like a dark beet red, and I was trying to get him to clench those tiny fists of his in anger. But see, that’s the problem with little chickenshits like him. No matter how hard you try, you just can’t get them riled up.

  “I’ve got this!” he said, holding up a clear plastic evidence bag with an obvious sense of pride. Big Jim wasn’t wearing his reading glasses, so he had to bend over to take a closer look. Me, I had to bend over to keep from laughing. The only thing inside the bag was a small piece of glass with a dark stain on it that bore a striking resemblance to dried blood.

  “Hey, a piece of glass.” I said. “Nice work, Squealer. Please tell me you found OJ’s bloody glove lying right next to it.”

  Squealer seemed confused as he shook his head, but at least the movement seemed to drain some of the color from his face. “No, Mike, I found it way up on the top floor of the garage….” He stretched his arms up in the air, as if I needed a visual aid to confirm the location of his find. “…as high as you can get. It was right next to the ledge where that fellow must have jumped from, judging by the angle of the body and the depth of the impact. It’s a piece of glass from a car window. Look!” He held the bag out towards me as if it was a first-place blue ribbon from a grade-school science fair.

  I snatched the baggie from his hand, then held it up to the sunlight. Sure enough, the shard of glass did look like it had come from a car window, and it even had part of a VIN number etched into it. I looked back at Squealer, who was standing there with his little chest puffed out and a huge grin painted across his face. “And this means what, exactly?”

  “Well, Mike, the way I see it….” Squealer paused to scratch his head, as if he was composing his thoughts.

  Yeah right, I thought, not the least bit fooled by his act. That little jerk had probably rehearsed his speech in the rearview mirror at least four times on the drive over.

  “It looks like there was a car break-in last night, in the exact same spot where this victim jumped from.” Squealer paused again, probably just for more dramatic effect, but he hurried on when Big Jim looked purposefully down at his wristwatch. “But there was no car there this morning! What’s more, the dispatchers told me that no auto break-ins were reported at the garage last night!”

  Squealer looked so smug standing there you’d have thought he’d just single-handedly taken down both the Mafia and Al Qaeda in one operation.

  Jim butt in, “So Team One didn’t have any car break-ins last night? That’s certainly cause for celebration, but what does any of this have to do with Detective Larsen’s suicide case?”

  I couldn’t help wincing when I heard Jim say that the suicide had become my case. Apparently he’d already forgotten our conversation about my workload.

  “So,” Squealer said, flailing his arms and whipping himself into a frenzy, “this means that someone else had to have been up on the top floor of that garage last night! They must have driven off in their car, broken window and all, without calling us to report it. Which means that the driver might have seen the suicide happen and was scared, maybe!” Squealer gasped, as if a horrifying thought had suddenly occurred to him. “Or maybe we’ve got a murder suspect on the loose!”

  Jim glanced down at his watch again and then looked at me. “Run with it, Goosey.” Before I had the chance to protest, he started walking towards his cruiser. “If you need me, you know where to find me.”

  Squealer did a queer little hop, almost like a kind of victory dance, and he practically leaped across the parking lot to his wagon while I cursed him under my breath and swore my revenge. Some guys can never be content with doing their own job, and always have to find more work for other people.

  I marched inside the Department, slamming the door as hard as I could behind me. Instead of a satisfying crash, all I heard was this weak little hiss from the hydraulic hinges. Just a half second later, I was almost crushed by a stampeding herd of cops who raced past me and out the back door. I started to wonder what was happening, until I heard the unmistakable roar of Chief Greene. By the sound of his voice roaring down the hallway, he was back off his meds and about to blow up.

  “YOU SEE THAT CLOCK ON THE WALL?” he bellowed.

  I stopped for a second at the base of the stairs, craning my neck to see who might be on the receiving end of his tirade.

  “THAT CLOCK RIGHT THERE! IT’S BROKEN! BUT EVEN THAT CLOCK IS STILL RIGHT TWICE A DAY! DO YOU HEAR ME? I SHOULD HIRE THAT CLOCK TO DO YOUR DAMN JOB!”

  I caught a glimpse of the Chief as he barged around the corner. It was entirely possible that he might not have been screaming at anyone in particular, but maybe just screaming to hear his own voice. Chief Greene had a reputation
for being a bit different, and on this particular day he was wearing his shiny dress shoes, uniform pants and a gun belt with nothing but a white undershirt on top. Apparently, none of the cowards fleeing the station had enough guts to point out his uniform discrepancy. I’d never seen the Chief undressed before, and I couldn’t help noticing just how far his nipples stuck out. They were like a pair of stubby brown fingertips that pointed out from beneath his undershirt, just searching for somebody to accuse.

  I must have stuck around enjoying the show for a split second too long, because the Chief spotted me on the stairwell. “LARKEN!”

  Damn it. I stuck my head over the railing. “Morning, Chief. What can I do for you, sir?”

  “GO CHANGE THE BATTERIES IN THAT CLOCK!”

  The order caught me off guard, but I managed a “Yes sir, Chief, right away.” My fearless leader seemed to calm down after he’d had the chance to abuse someone, and he marched out the back door, mumbling to himself all the while.

  That was a close call, I thought. I’d been cursed out by the bosses quite a few times in my career, but I’d never before been sentenced to lowly janitorial work. I climbed up a few more steps to peek down the second floor hallway, but saw the door to the supply office was closed. That could only mean those old skeletons were away from the station, probably hanging around the BlackTalian with everyone else, and they might not be back for hours. I thought about just blowing the Chief off, but on the small chance he’d remember my face or Christine Larken’s name, I just couldn’t leave the clock hanging there with a set of dead batteries. I went back downstairs and snatched it off the wall, then tossed it into the garbage can in the locker room garbage can, burying it underneath a deep layer of wet paper towels.

  10.

  I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was going to be running around putting out fires all day, so I very reluctantly headed up to my desk to get a jump on things. Once there, I killed a couple minutes shuffling through a fresh stack of pink message slips before finally just tossing them all in the trash. I had enough work to do already without wasting time on any more needy people who couldn’t solve their own problems.

  After all, I still had to find out why exactly Leonard Encienario had been in Charleston before he drowned on Monday. And even though I’d already closed out Hooks’ accidental death case, I still planned to follow up with James Smithson’s wife to see if she had any idea why his fingerprints might have turned up at the scene of the crime. But most importantly, I still needed to pawn off that morning’s suicide case on some other sucker.

  I rooted through all the junk in my desk for a few minutes before finally coming up with Benson’s three-page listing of all the private hospices and residential care facilities in Charleston. Even with the sloppy handwriting, the list was a huge find missing persons cases are usually just a matter of making enough phone calls. Usually it’s either at the hospitals or the morgues but as a rule, missing persons will eventually turn up somewhere.

  I dove in and started working my way down the list from the top, calling each place to check for the name Encienario, and also to see if that morning’s jumper was one of theirs. More than an hour later, after dealing with snotty receptionists and getting put on hold over and over, I was still striking out. It seemed that

  no one wanted to claim either of my stiffs, and they might have simply fallen out of the sky. Well, at least one of them had, anyway. Making all those phone calls was really going above and beyond, but Big Jim had said to be thorough. That guy prefers to cover his ass and since I fell under his command, my ass was covered by default. It was almost noon by the time I finally finished up, and after skipping breakfast that morning my stomach was practically growling in revolt. I’d almost made it out of the office on my way to lunch when my phone started ringing.

  As if the day hadn’t been bad enough already, it was Katie Maslow calling to tell me that the jumper’s autopsy would take place at one o’clock that afternoon. I agreed to show up, but mostly as a way to get her off the phone quickly. The procedure would be cutting into my lunch hour a lot more deeply than I would have liked, but I figured that I still had just enough time to grab a takeout plate from the BlackTalian on the way up to her office. I had already pulled together my loose stack of case files and wandered out into the hallway before I caught sight of Squealer waiting there to ambush me.

  Before I could duck back into the office, the little turd shouted, “Hey Mike!”

  Don White and J. C. Mangel, these two crusty old motor cops from the Traffic Division, were taking up space a little farther down the hallway. They shifted their attention towards us in order to listen in, and it looked like they were doing their best to keep from laughing.

  “What is it now, Squealer?” I was trying to make the encounter as quick as possible, since it’s a serious risk to any cop’s reputation if you’re seen talking to that turd.

  Squealer was so worked up that he was almost wheezing, and he actually had to stop for a minute to catch his breath. “Big Tony down in ID… he just checked out the shard of glass I brought back from the parking garage.” The kid stuck the plastic evidence bag in my face again, just in case I hadn’t wasted enough time admiring it earlier.

  I took a close look at the piece of glass and saw that absolutely nothing had changed since that morning. “Yeah, Squealer,” I said. “I can tell Fat Tony’s had his hands on it. There’s a greasy fingerprint on the bag, and it smells like pizza.”

  Fat Tony Phelps was one of the cops assigned to our identification division. Tony was big boned by nature, and he’d finally gotten dumped into ID when he grew too big to fit into a patrol car. It looked like the commanders had been planning to leave him out there working the streets until he suffered a coronary, but one day the Chief spotted Fat Tony getting into a patrol car and completely flipped out. Tony had grown so large that he couldn’t even raise his arms anymore, and he had to use one of those old-school PR-24 batons to hook the window frame and pull the car door closed. Ever since then, Tony spent his days working down in the ID room, balancing his wide ass on one of those narrow rolling stools with an inkpad in one hand and a double cheeseburger in the other.

  I looked up at Squealer. “So what?”

  “So he ran the VIN number for me! Here’s the printout!” Squealer shoved a couple sheets of computer paper at me. I looked around and saw Mangel still standing at the end of the hallway with his arms crossed, clearly enjoying the show. White was twitching his nose up and down, doing his best impersonation of a rat.

  I snatched the papers from his hand. “How’s about you leave the detective work to the real cops, Squealer?” I stormed off toward the front stairwell, shooting a dirty look at Mangel and White since those clowns were doubled over with laughter, having a ball at my expense.

  White was the first to catch his breath. He whispered as I passed, “What’s the matter, Larsen? You having a little spat with your girlfriend?”

  “Yeah, real funny,” I growled, slowing down just long enough to give him a shove. “If both of you jerks are here, then who the hell is guarding the Krispy Kreme?”

  Downstairs, Big Jim was pulling into the station just as I was stepped outside, so I had no choice but to stop and talk to him again. Jim’s more of a socializer than he is a worker, and there’ve been days when he’s gone the whole shift without even setting one foot inside the station. I’ve seen him actually show up early to stake out a post by the back door, so he can spend the entire day running his mouth to every cop who’s stupid enough to say good morning as they walk past. When Jim was in a talking mood, entering into a conversation with him was a lot like being hijacked. There was nothing you could do but wait, endure the torture and pray for someone to come to the rescue.

  There was a splotchy red stain on his tie that hadn’t been there that morning, and I knew it couldn’t have been blood since Jim never shows up at crime scenes. My trained eyes spotted the limp spaghetti noodle hanging down off his holster, and I deduced
that the mystery stain couldn’t be anything other than marinara sauce. Jim gave his stomach a slow rub of satisfaction, a move which confirmed my analysis. “You better get down there, Goosey! The manicotti’s going fast.”

  I grumbled at the thought of missing lunch, which didn’t happen often. “No can do. I’ve got to skip the BlackTalian today, boss.”

  Jim stared at me in disbelief. He probably thought I was getting ready to claim sickness and hit him up about the possibility of going home early. “Nice try, Goosey, but you look fine to me. Take two Tums and get back to work. Say, do you even have any sick days left?”

  I must have played the upset stomach card a time too many, and I made a mental note to come up with some new excuses for the following week. It might be time to go back to the old standby of a having close relative die unexpectedly, but I’d already put half of my family in the ground since last summer. Even though bosses never want to seem insensitive and pump a grieving person for information, it was only a matter of time before Big Jim took notice of the fact that my relatives always passed away on a Friday, and also that the funerals were always held on Monday mornings. But hey, that was the beauty of working for a guy who was the first to disappear on Friday afternoons and who kept his office door shut on Monday mornings in order to sleep off the hangovers.

  Still, it pissed me off that he’d automatically assumed I was trying to skate out of work. “My stomach’s fine for a change, Jim, but I am getting sick of having all this crap work dumped on me. I’ve got new cases popping up left and right, and that’s on top of all the open files I already have pending! How can I be out looking for missing persons if I’m stuck dealing with dead bodies every day?” I glared at him for a moment, letting the point sink in.