Inheritance

by Joe McKinney

  But his thoughts just wouldn’t fall in line.

  He was too numb for that.

  Margie put her arms around him and he put his around her. They stayed that way for nearly a minute, neither of them speaking.

  She finally broke the silence.

  “I need to call Jenny. I’ve got to talk to her. Tell her we’re here for her. She’ll need someone there with her.”

  He started to object and thought better of it. The Department had very set procedures for handling next of kin notifications when officers were involved. It would start with two uniformed sergeants from the Crisis Response Unit delivering the initial bad news. Then, over the next few hours, the wife—it was almost always the wife—would get visits from counselors and the Police Officers Association president and even members of the Command Staff. His first instinct was to tell Margie that Jenny Cantrell would have enough people there with her, but a voice in his head silenced that. Margie and Jenny Cantrell were best friends. It had been Jenny, after all, who introduced them. He could no more keep his wife from Jenny’s side now than he could turn back time to before this call landed in his lap. And with all the administrative visits that Jenny Cantrell was going to have to endure over the next few hours, maybe Margie could help.

  Anderson simply nodded.

  She sniffled and rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. “I’ll go make us some coffee,” she said.

  He went into the bathroom and wet his face and hair at the sink. He dressed quickly, then slipped back into the blue golf shirt and jeans he had just put in the dirty clothes hamper

  Keith stared at himself in the mirror for a moment, then went to work.

  ***

  A fleet of marked Patrol units and Evidence units and unmarked supervisor cars were parked inside the gate. Beyond them, closer to the main part of the factory, Anderson could see eight EMS wagons and more Patrol vehicles parked in the grass. The factory itself looked like Dresden at the end of World War II, rubble everywhere, the moon-silvered ruins of walls and smokestacks thrown up against greasy-looking clouds.

  And the night was hot.

  Anderson felt the heat on his face almost as soon as he stepped out of his car. He took off his favorite gray sweater—his Mr. Rogers sweater, as the younger detectives in Homicide called it—and tossed it on the passenger seat. From the south entrance he had a view of the superstructure straight ahead and the other part of the factory to his left. He had no idea what that part was called, but to Anderson it looked like a bowl of spaghetti, catwalks and ramps and pipes leading every which way. Most of the police and EMS personnel were there, so he went that way, too.

  A uniformed officer gave him a tired, almost bored look, but when he saw the gold emblem on Anderson’s shirt he straightened up and pointed and said, “Over there, sir.”

  Anderson gave him a nod and walked into the thick of things.

  There were people everywhere, spotlights shining into the superstructure and the adjacent catwalks. Anderson stared at the wreckage of the factory with all its twisted metal and the skeins of orange dust streaking across the broken asphalt that had once been a parking lot. It’s not real, he tried to tell himself, though he had no illusions about that. It was all too real. So damn real it made his head spin.

  A camera flash went off on the second level and Anderson glanced up at it. Another flash went off and in the moment that the flash lit the scene, Anderson could see the body of a junkie on his back on the catwalk, one knee bent, pointed up in the air, one hand sagged over the belly, the head craned back, the mouth open, and a gory hole in the chest area.

  Jesus, he thought. What am I gonna tell Jenny Cantrell about this?

  ***

  There were still a few EMS technicians coming and going from the maze of catwalks at the edge of the scene. Special lanes had been marked off for them in order to minimize contamination with the crime scene, but Anderson was pretty sure plenty of valuable evidence had been trampled underfoot nonetheless. Despite all the training, all the reminders, it happened at every crime scene.

  He watched the EMS guys lugging their orange and white tackle boxes out of the structure, most of them looking down at the ground in front of them with weary, haunted eyes, and he thought, When you see those guys looking like that, you know it’s bad.

  “Hey Keith!”

  Anderson turned toward the voice. It belonged to Deputy Chief Robert Allen. If he’d been awakened in the middle of a sound sleep by an urgent phone call, as Anderson suspected he had, it didn’t show on him. His iron gray hair was perfect, and his suit hung on his still athletic frame with sartorial precision.

  Anderson walked over to him and shook hands. “How are you, sir?” he said to Allen.

  “I’m all right, Keith. I’m sorry about Ram.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Have you gotten a chance to see inside yet?” Allen asked.

  “No sir.”

  “It’s...” he trailed off, shaking his head. “So far EMS has pronounced forty-five dead. That includes Ram and Herrera. They tell me they found three shell casings from Ram’s gun. At least he got to fight back. I have a bad feeling this one’s going to be hanging over our heads for a long time to come.”

  Anderson had been thinking the same thing. Later, when all the patrol officers were gone and their reports filed, and the evidence technicians had processed the scene and submitted their evidence for testing, and the junkies were all interviewed, it would be Anderson’s job to go through the mountain of paperwork and forensic testing reports and autopsies and photographs and videos and statements and try to find the through line that connected them—the one cohesive answer, the thread, explaining how and why something like this could possibly happen. He would have help, of course, because every member of the Homicide Unit’s Murder Squad worked on each and every case, doing whatever was needed to move the case along towards a successful resolution. But in the end, the weight of coming up with that explanation was squarely on his shoulders, and no one else’s. And, of course, he still had thirty other murder cases open. He’d have to work those at the same time.

  Anderson chewed on his bottom lip, a nervous habit. When he looked back at Allen, Allen curled one corner of his mouth into a sort of smile. “You know,” Allen said, “if you hadn’t drawn this case, I think I would have ordered Levy to assign it to you.”

  That surprised Anderson. He had half-expected to have the case taken from him and assigned to somebody else, simply because of his personal involvement with the victim. “Why’s that, sir?”

  “There’s a lot riding on this, Keith. An awful lot. You know that, of course, but I want you to know that I would have ordered you back here from a European vacation if I’d had to. You’re the one I want on this. You’re the one I need on this. Do you understand?”

  “Yes sir,” he said. “I understand you loud and clear.”

  ***

  The last of the EMS crews were walking back across the barricades, and Anderson happened to overhear a technician who had been inside saying that the whole place was crawling with fleas.

  “Fucking gross is what it was,” the man’s partner said. “I looked down and saw those little bastards all over my pants.”

  Fleas? Anderson thought. Oh great.

  As a boot patrolman, he’d made a burglary call where a woman told him somebody had broken into the shed behind her house. Anderson went into the yard to investigate. He walked around the shed in knee high grass, examining the busted lock on the door, when he felt an itch in his crotch. He looked down to scratch himself, and saw fleas all over his pant legs. They made it look like he had spilled pepper on himself. Fleas gave him the shivers ever since.

  Someone from inside the building started screaming. It was a horrible sound, less that of a man than of a trapped animal, whimpering and afraid and screaming all at the same time.

  Anderson backed up so he could see the catwalks directly above him, trying to find where the sound was coming from. Soon
there was more yelling. Anderson had to fight the urge to charge inside. There was enough going on in there without him becoming part of the problem, and as he looked up and down the line of barricades he saw others watching the superstructure with the same look of confused irritation he wore, all of them fighting the urge to rush inside.

  And then, just as suddenly as it started, the yelling stopped. Anderson listened expectantly for a moment, and then, from somewhere off to his right, he heard Deputy Chief Allen yelling at somebody for an explanation.

  The radio was silent.

  Whoever had run up there to investigate the noise hadn’t reported anything over the air yet. Anderson checked his radio instinctively, just to make sure it was still on, and waited.

  From where he stood, he could see a long, rickety section of the catwalk that wound around the old rusted supervisor’s station. A very terrified, very mangy-looking man ran onto that catwalk, screaming the whole way at the policemen who were trying to grab him. Uniformed officers closed in on both sides.

  From three stories down, Anderson watched the fear play out on the man’s face and thought, Oh my God, he’s gonna jump.

  The man grabbed onto the railing like he believed it was the only thing in the world that wasn’t trying to kill him. He glanced wide-eyed at the officers closing in on him, his lips white with spit, his mouth a grimace of terror, and then, for no reason Anderson could see, he just gave up. He slumped down into a pile on the catwalk and sobbed helplessly as uniformed officers closed in on him.

  “What in the hell?” Anderson said.

  But he was thinking: Hot damn, maybe we got us a witness.

  Chapter 5

  Interview Room Two.

  Everything in here was videotaped by a camera hidden in a light switch on the back wall. Burned to CD now, actually, Anderson reminded himself. Everything is on CD these days. Technically speaking, they hadn’t videotaped anybody in four or five years at least.

  There were signs in English and Spanish on every door leading into SAPD Headquarters that said:

  WARNING: ALL PERSONS ENTERING THIS FACILITY ARE SUBJECT TO VIDEO SURVEILLANCE AT ALL TIMES.

  The same sign was repeated on the doors to the Homicide Office, and this, as far as the courts were concerned, was sufficient notice to witnesses and suspects alike that anything they said to a detective in here was likely to end up on video.

  But Anderson doubted that the nearly comatose junkie sitting across from him had read the signs, or seen them, or if he could even read at all. And if he can read, and if he did see the signs, he probably doesn’t care, Anderson thought. Guys like him, with their slushed brains, their minds charred to cinders, don’t give a shit about anything except their next dose. Where’s it coming from? Who can get it for me? What can I steal to pay for it?

  The room they were in was drab in the extreme. Anderson had been in here a thousand times over the years, interviewing suspects beyond number. It was little more than a closet, not anywhere near what they showed in those TV detective shows where there’s plenty of space to pace around and slap files down on the desk and a one way mirror so the lieutenant and the DA can look on eagerly. There was none of that. What he had was a desk with a busted top drawer that hung down and barked you in the knees if you tried to take notes, two old chairs, a phone, a trashcan in the corner that somebody had spit tobacco juice into, and black dirt thick as tree moss in the space where the walls met the floor. Over the years, Anderson had come to know every stray ink mark on the white plaster walls, every stain on the carpet; and now, having spent the last hour trying to get something, anything, out of what he saw as the worthless piece of human garbage sitting next to him, he felt like he knew every stain on this man’s face as well. He certainly knew his smell. He stank like a corpse.

  Earlier, when the officers pulled him down from the catwalks at the Morgan Rollins Iron Works, they’d managed to get him to say his name, but that had pretty much been the one and only boxcar in the information train. But it was enough for them to look him up in the Master Name File. A few minutes of poking around, and the other Murder Squad detectives assisting Anderson on the case had been able to come up with nearly two hundred pages of history on the man—basically his whole adult life, reduced to a list of arrests and mentions in various official reports from one agency or another.

  He was David Everett, thirty-eight years old. Everett stood five foot ten and a hundred and twenty pounds. He wore blue, mud-stained pants, tennis shoes with holes in the sides and jerry rigged shoelaces tied in places other than the ends, and a nasty t-shirt that may once have been white under all that dirt and grime and dried sweat but certainly wasn’t now. His face was a disgusting mess of sores and blisters, his lips scorched. His teeth were black, what few of them he still had, and his eyes were sunken pits, the light all but gone from them. The veins on the inside of his elbows had collapsed beneath a ladder of track marks.

  He was a non-functioning heroin addict, which meant, in practical terms, no job, no home, no family, no future. Not much more than what was necessary in the way of biography to tell Anderson what kind of man he was dealing with. Here was a junkie, plain and simple.

  There was a report in his file written by an investigator with Adult Protective Services describing his last known physical address. David Everett had once lived with his invalid grandmother in a house in the 1200 block of Berryhill Street, which was where you’d stick the applicator if you needed to give the City of San Antonio an enema. The investigator from APS described the house as a crumbling shack with a weedpatch yard swarming with fleas, rubble strewn all over the floors, a cat box in the center of the living room that looked like it had never been emptied, cats everywhere, walking on the table, nosing through the endless piles of garbage on the floor, and Mrs. Thompson, David Everett’s grandmother, blind, diabetic, delirious with Alzheimer’s, abandoned in her bed, stuck to filthy sheets by oozing bed sores all over her back and the places around her hips where she’d soiled herself.

  Mrs. Thompson was removed from the home and charges were filed against David Everett for Neglect and Injury to the Elderly, for which he spent eight months in the Bexar County Jail while he awaited trial. Mrs. Thompson died while David Everett was in jail and the charges just seemed to have simply evaporated. They should have been refiled as Criminally Negligent Homicide, but for whatever reason they weren’t, and David Everett left the jail with no home to go back to and an aching in his belly for the numbing glow of heroin.

  You gotta love it when the system fucks up, Anderson thought. Nothing else can equal this kind of inhuman tragedy.

  David Everett had been arrested nearly forty other times for crimes ranging from burglary of a habitation to heroin possession to inhalant abuse. Several of his heroin arrests had been made by Bobby Cantrell, and that little bit of information had caused a flurry of excitement around the office when it first came up. But the idea of a junkie seeking revenge against a Narcotics detective was shot down almost immediately. Between huffing paint and shooting heroin, David Everett’s mind had become a desert and his body a walking Petri dish of disease. He was little more than a shell of a man, and everyone agreed he just wasn’t capable of the kind of systematic carnage that they had seen at the crime scene—not against forty something other junkies, and certainly not against two armed Narcotics detectives.

  And certainly not against Bobby Cantrell. Ram would have snapped the man in half like a twig if he’d so much as raised a finger against him.

  So the question remained. How come so many people died, including two very well-trained and well-armed detectives, and this worthless piece of shit lived? How does something like that happen?

  Anderson felt a migraine coming on. For him, they always started right between his eyes, and he pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to head off the pressure. He stared at David Everett for maybe a minute, asking himself the same set of questions over and over again—Why? How?—but he was unable to work around the thought that
the migraine was about to explode like a hydrogen bomb, no matter what he did at this point.

  It was cold inside the room. He said, “I’m going to get a cup of coffee. You want something? A soda maybe?”

  David Everett said nothing, just looked vacantly off into space.

  “Right,” Anderson said, and left the room.

  ***

  He stepped into the main part of the Homicide Office and looked over a sea of cubicles. Detectives and uniformed patrol officers were everywhere. The noise was tremendous. The phones wouldn’t stop ringing. Levy had authorized emergency call-in overtime for most of the Homicide Unit, even those not assigned to the Murder Squad, and even though regular office hours didn’t start for another thirty minutes or so, most of the cubicles were occupied. The noise hit Anderson like a wave and he groaned as the migraine that had been threatening to explode for the past hour or so finally blew up.

  He took a few deep breaths and tried to control the pain. It was like some little bastard was standing on the bridge of his nose and pounding on his forehead with a sledgehammer.

  And the office was freezing cold.

  He put on his Mr. Rogers sweater. Then he went to the little kitchenette up by the secretary’s desk and poured himself a cup of coffee. He liked it straight up black, no cream, no sugar. He put the cup to his lips, sniffed the steam, and took a sip. Then he went to the video room and stood next to Levy, watching David Everett on a monitor.

  “Not going so well,” Levy said.

  “Nope.”

  Levy was short and nearly round. He wore comfort fit black Walmart slacks and a white shirt with a green and gold colored tie. The shirt was wrinkled, with a coffee stain on the left elbow, and the neck was too tight for him. It pinched him there, and his skin rolled over the top of the collar. Anderson wondered if the man could breathe with it that tight. He listened, and he could hear him wheezing.