This development is unacceptable. In a city that is comfortable with the brazen violence that fills the streets, a murder of this kind, one that shakes people's senses to the core, must be solved. We cannot allow the citizenry to be afraid in their own homes. Some things need to be sacred, and it's up to the police to make sure they stay that way.
It has come to light that the lead investigator of the case, Detective Dylan Knox, has a troubling history. Though he is a decorated officer with a large number of cases solved, sources say he was once involved in harassing an assault victim, driving her to suicide.
Is this the kind of man we want keeping us safe? How is it no one ever knew about charges so severe?
The police department has much to answer for, and it does not appear that we are going to be given any. The department has been tight-lipped as to any developments in the case, and our repeated requests for information have been rebuffed in the strongest of terms.
Their silence begs the question; what are they hiding? One theory is that they have already given up trying to solve the case, but are putting detectives on the streets to keep up the appearance of doing their due diligence. If this is in fact true, it is a scandal waiting to explode.
The murder of George Hobbes was a tragedy, but what it is revealing about the underbelly of this city, and the people sworn to protect it, may just be the ray of light needed to show the filth we have allowed ourselves to live in.
Chapter 13
The Erosion Of Respect
Detective Lane watched the hand circle the clock, measuring the icy silence he sat in. It felt to him as though it was unending, even as he could see each individual second elapse. Time was an illusion, a construct for dissecting pieces of lives into more manageable chunks. Thinking was easier when the scope was smaller, when the bits of knowledge could fall through the sieve and pile up like the sands at the bottom of an hourglass.
“Are we really not going to talk about this?”
Detective Knox's gaze shifted to look at his partner, his head not wasting the energy required to face him. He was already beginning to regret telling his story, as Lane now wanted to talk about his feelings. Knox had long since put the ordeal behind him, as much as he could, and that was where he preferred it to stay. He could never forget what he had done, nor excuse it, but the scars dulled around the edges when he wasn't constantly being reminded of his mistake.
“I thought we just did?”
“You know what I mean. Are you going to put that out there and just walk away?”
“That was the idea.”
“Too bad. If you're trying to teach me a lesson, you have to explain it with a bit more clarity.”
Knox was not a natural teacher; he lacked the patience for the job. He had learned through attrition, by analyzing his experiences and siphoning out the important details. It didn't occur to him that he might be unique in that regard, that others lacked the ability to discern what was and was not important to know without being shown how. Human nature was frustrating to Knox, because human contact was unavoidable.
“Why can't you just figure it out for yourself? It'll do you more good that way.”
“That will just teach me the lesson I think I should learn from your story. It doesn't mean I'll learn the lesson you want me to.”
“Dammit, that actually makes sense.”
“I thought it might.”
Knox was not eager to relive the memory, not because of the feelings it would bring back to the surface, but because of the erosion of respect that was bound to come along with it. He could handle the backwash of guilt that would rise inside him, it was a degree of suffering he had grown to believe he deserved. What he could not accept as easily was the way people who knew his secret looked at him, how fellow sinners could pass judgment so easily. It struck him as absurd that, no matter the dark secrets others hid, he was condemned by all who knew.
“I told you that story so you might understand the importance of not getting ahead of yourself. It's easy to start believing something, and then forget that you might be wrong. We're all liable to bouts of hubris, and the best thing we can ever do is learn how to be critical of ourselves. If I had learned that at the time, maybe things would have turned out differently.”
“Why were you so sure you were right?”
“That's the question, isn't it? Honestly, I can't tell you why. Back then, I didn't think I could be wrong, so when I had a hunch, I ran with it.”
“I'm sure you had done it before.”
“Of course I had. And that just made it worse. Every time you take a risk and it pays off, you become goaded into taking more and more risks, until it eventually blows up in your face.”
“Which will always happen.”
“Absolutely. Luck doesn't run forever, and it's only a matter of time until you strike out. When that happens, you have to hope it's not at a critical time. I didn't get fortunate that way.”
“Basically, you're telling me that I need to challenge everything I assume, to make sure the foundation of my conclusions is solid.”
“Right. If you're wrong at the start, you're never going to get to the right finish.”
“So, with that in mind, what if we've been working with a wrong assumption on this case?”
“What are you thinking?”
“We've been assuming that no one could have been in the room to commit the murder, but what if there is a way to get in and out that we missed?”
“That's not a half-bad idea. Do you think we should go back again and see if we can figure something out?”
“If nothing else, it'll get your mind off the past.”
“Let's go.”
* * *
Puzzles have solutions, but they aren't always obvious, and can escape you if you don't know what it is you're looking for. Detective Knox realized the truth of the axiom as they stood at the scene once again. No matter how closely they had looked before, they could not catalog every detail. The information they acquired was filtered through the lens of what they already knew, meaning the needle in the haystack could be ignored if they weren't looking for one.
That there was no escape from the room was obvious, otherwise they would have already identified it upon their first inspection. They had assumed the locked doors and windows led to a single conclusion, but Lane was right to challenge this assumption. Plenty of antique buildings contained hidden secrets and passages, the sorts of tricks that made escape possible. Without a blueprint, finding those avenues, were they to exist, required patience, skill, and a degree of luck Knox was confident they did not possess.
Lane instructed his partner to lock him out of the room, in order to test his acumen and see if there was a method for breaching the locked door. Knox heard rustling and scraping on the other side of the oak blockade, but didn't expect the brass latch to move. A simple examination of the mechanism had told Knox everything he needed to know; that there was no method of moving it from outside the room without conjuring magic into reality. Lane made a valiant effort, considering every possibility.
Hearing a knock, Knox let his partner back in, confident they could now cross that point of contention off their list. Lane did not seem frustrated, but rather disappointed that he had not stumbled upon an elegant solution to their problem.
“There's no way anyone got through that door.”
“I agree, but I could have told you that before you wasted your energy trying to get through it.”
“We're here to challenge assumptions. You can't do that without a little experimental methodology.”
“Have it your way. If you want to fail, be my guest.”
The pair continued their search, scouring the walls for any clue that a hidden door lay waiting behind them. Lane plucked books from the shelves, hoping each one was the trigger to open a portal, while Knox ran his hands over the smooth surfaces, looking for a crease that could conceal a hinged escape. No inch of the room was left untouched, but they were unable to find any
thing they had missed in their earlier inspections.
Lane dropped to his knees, anxious to see if the answer had been under foot the whole time. A wooden floor could easily hide a false board that might cover a tunnel, and Knox watched as his partner scoured the floor for a sliver of wood out of place.
With a thought in mind, Knox left the room and went into the adjoining one. He paced out measurements, doing rudimentary architectural calculations in his head. Having satisfied himself, he walked outside, around the building, examining the walls that contained the scene from the prying eyes of the outside world. He was confident in what he could see, and returned to find Lane sitting on the floor, his head hung in despair.
“I can't find anything out of the ordinary. There's not a loose board in this floor, so there's no hidden trap door. We're stuck.”
“Yes we are. I looked around, and none of the walls surrounding us are deep enough to accommodate a hidden passage. There really was no way for anyone to have gotten in and out of here, other than the locked doors and windows.”
“Which no one could have done.”
“Exactly.”
“So we just wound up right back where we started.”
“Yes, but you were right about needing to challenge ourselves. It didn't work this time, but it will eventually.”
“You sound more confident than I do. How can that be?”
“Because you didn't hear the good news yet.”
“We got kicked off the case?”
“No. The tech guys have finished decrypting the drive we found. Let's go find out if there's anything useful on it.”
“There had better be.”
“Admit it, you had fun ripping this place apart.”
“Sure, but puzzle solving is only fun when you know there's an answer waiting for you. For all we know, we're trying to lasso the moon.”
“Maybe, but think what a trick it would be if you pulled it off.”
“You're not helping.”
“I don't try to. It's not my style.”
“No kidding.”
Chapter 14
Yelling At Clouds
Computers were strange beasts to Detective Knox, plastic boxes filled with magic, a portal into a world he didn't want to understand. Walking into a room filled with them, and the artificial hum of life they give off, made him uneasy. The light was different in rooms filled with technology, fuzzy, as though your eyes were out of focus. He understood that technology brought with it great advances, leaps that were able to make his job easier, but his relationship with it was still strained. He did not want his job to be easier. The difficulty of sifting through clues, to be able to string them together in the perfect fashion, that was the beauty of the job.
Detective Knox had not remained in the force as long as he had, as the very foundation of the world cracked and shattered under his feet, for any other reason. He lived for the puzzles, and the elegance of solving them. There were now countless tools created by geniuses to help him achieve that goal, but just as many were being used to obfuscate the truth and change the rules of the game. Technology, he reckoned, existed merely to give people something new to complain about, though the task at hand never changed. A new coat of paint was slapped upon the same old problem, and people were convinced they were looking at a whole new work of art.
Detective Lane's youth gave him a different insight, and his ignorance of the old ways made him prone to thinking Knox was merely upset that the world was not the way he remembered it. Lane was quick to embrace anything that could help him in his quest to be a detective, not because he wished to take the easy way out, but because he was determined to help people, to answer the call and give people answers in their darkest moments. In doing that he would often require help, and he was not too proud to ask for it.
“Let me guess, Lane, you're going to try to explain all of the technological gobbledygook the nerd squad is going to run through. Let me save you the trouble. Please don't.”
“You really need to learn at least a little bit of this stuff. You're going to sound like you don't know anything if you get put on the stand at a trial. If you want to put killers away, you have to have an air of authority about you.”
Detective Knox laughed at his partner, not a snort of derision over the idea that his younger cohort had any idea what authority meant, but a gentle acknowledgment that despite how much time they were forced to spend together investigating crimes, Lane had yet to understand how Knox's mind worked.
“Did it ever occur to you that what you described is precisely what I'm going for?”
“Why on earth would you ever want to sound ignorant?”
“Because, partner, the ignorant aren't asked to be expert witnesses. There's going to come a time when your puppy dog enthusiasm wears off, when the job grinds away the shine of your smile, and when that happens, you're going to be as tired and bitter as I am. The last thing you're going to want to do is sit in a courtroom and listen to people trying to tell you the sky isn't blue.”
Lane looked at his partner, trying to assess how genuine these feelings were. He knew that Knox was not a fan of the non-investigative duties the job entailed, but he had never heard it phrased so bluntly. He was disappointed to hear that Knox appeared to have stopped reaching for personal growth, resigned to being the old coot sitting in a rocking chair, yelling at clouds, telling stories about how much better everything used to be.
“You say that, but we both know that you like to put on an act. You're afraid of letting anyone think that you still care, to make sure they leave you alone. I get it. I know what you're up to, but I'm going to let it be.”
“You'd better, if you want to see what tomorrow looks like.”
As the door opened, and the stale, recycled air hit his nose, Detective Knox wondered what it must be like to spend an entire life in such rooms, surrounded by machines designed to mimic and impersonate life. To spend day after day engaged with a facsimile, communicating entirely through the pounding of keys and flickering written words, could not be a life with much value in it. Being human, he thought, required embracing what life had to offer. Even for a solitary man like Knox, humanity could not be found in an endless string of ones and zeros.
The technicians never broke their focus as the detectives entered. Their eyes were fixed in a trance upon their screens, their fingers falling like a steady rain upon the keys. Knox listened to the tapping, a rhythmic white noise that only further convinced him no consciousness could survive in such a place. Impatient, he spun a monitor around, breaking the connection between eye and screen. The technician's fingers stopped, but his eyes did not move, as though he were processing what had just happened. Seconds later, he looked up, and the blank expression on his face was as lifeless as his reflection on the screen.
“Nice to see you back in the land of the living. I hear you have some information for me?”
The technician didn't know what to make of Detective Knox, nor what to make of face to face communication. An expression of discomfort was evident on his face, a fact that Knox took great pride in admiring.
“I assume you're Detective Knox?”
“My reputation does seem to precede me.”
“Yes, we managed to decrypt the flash drive you gave us. There was a . . .”
“Let me stop you there. I don't need to know the details of what hoops you had to jump through to get the files open. I won't understand any of it, and you probably don't want to talk to me any longer than you have to, so how about you just tell me where the files are, and I'll leave you to ogle your little screen again.”
The technician reached into a pile of neatly organized trinkets, arranged in a pattern that Knox knew meant something, but was not important enough to waste his time thinking about. Though he was a fan of puzzles, cracking the enigmas of which most people consisted was something best left for his retirement. He did not care to know much about people until he had no choice but to depend on them and had nothing better to wa
ste his time on.
He selected one of many identical pieces of plastic, fondling it quickly before stretching his hand out as one would throw meat to a hungry animal. Fear may have been the culprit, or he could have been awkward because of the atrophied sense of coordination caused by a life sitting in front of a computer. Knox took the drive from his hand, being careful not to touch him. Not knowing how deep the neuroses ran, Knox didn't want to set off more alarms than he needed to.
“That flash drive has the decrypted files on it. You can view them as they were, or you can look at them according to the sorting we did. Everything on the original drive is on that one, so if there isn't anything helpful in the files, please don't blame me.”
“Don't worry, kid. I don't want to come back here anymore than you want me to.”
“Oh good.”
“You said it.”
* * *
The detectives returned to their desks, and the clamor of the precinct was music to Knox's ears. He missed the noise whenever it disappeared. Being left alone with your thoughts is only helpful when you have things in your mind that are worth exploring. Otherwise, hearing nothing but your own inner voice is a form of torture.
Detective Lane inserted the drive, watching the list grow as the files loaded. On first inspection, the names seemed innocuous enough; financial files that Mr. Hobbes would not have wanted the prying eyes of his family to see, medical records that dated back for decades, records of correspondence that may very well have cataloged his entire life. Knox thought it depressing that a man's whole existence, the sum total of who he was, could be shrunk down and fit upon a small piece of plastic that could easily be drowned in a cup of coffee. This was the future, as far as he was concerned, and it was not the utopia he had been promised.
The detectives split the files, reading through the mundane details as quickly as they could. If they dared take their time, Detective Knox was afraid some of the details would become embedded in his mind, and he did not wish to create lasting memories of a person he never even had the misfortune of knowing. Over the course of his career, Knox had developed the skill of reading without learning, skimming through the reams of information and identifying what was important enough to keep, while throwing aside the junk data. It was a skill that carried over into his personal life, a fact that those few people Knox let in would make him aware of. Being a good detective, he thought, was not compatible with being a good person.
DARK CITY a gripping detective mystery Page 7