by Dave Daren
Dark circles rimmed his eyes that I hadn’t been able to notice from across the room, and I couldn’t help but wonder how long he’d been in the department that morning.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said as opposed to any sort of greeting.
As if to punctuate his point, his eyes cut from side-to-side, like he was making sure that no one else was around to see him speak to me.
“I have a right to be here like anyone else,” I said with a pleasant smile that didn’t seem to do much to sate his obvious nerves.
What the hell sort of department was Thompson running if one of his deputies looked this spooked to even be seen speaking with me? The thought was not a pleasant one. I had assumed that Thompson was just one of the many bullets in Knox’s gun, but it was beginning to seem like he was a criminal in his own right.
Jenkins shifted back in his seat and looked as if he was working quite hard to keep himself from fidgeting with anxiety.
I felt a little bad that I made him this nervous, but his nervousness wasn’t important enough to ignore the questions I needed to ask him and leave.
“I have some questions for you,” I began as gently as I could manage.
I felt like I was talking to a skittish animal caught in a trap or maybe a small child that wanted to do nothing more than hide behind their parents’ legs.
I kept my posture relaxed and open, and I was once again glad for the fact I’d dressed down. I assumed that had I walked into the precinct dressed in a suit, Jenkins might have demanded I leave on sight as opposed to his hesitant warning.
Jenkins cut his eyes down to his desk and reached up to awkwardly peck at his keyboard with the tips of his fingers.
I assumed that there wasn’t actually anything on his screen, and that he just wanted to seem busy in the hopes that I’d leave, but that wasn’t a new trick, and he wasn’t particularly good at the execution.
“Do you know why all of the items available for auction aren’t listed on the roster on the department’s website?” I asked while I worked to maintain my non-confrontational demeanor.
Jenkins gave a small, nearly imperceptible shake of his head, and I couldn’t be sure if it was an answer to my question or just a sort of non-response.
Clearly, direct questions wouldn’t work, so I decided to try a new approach.
“What’s your name?” I asked with a kind smile as I leaned forward to rest my elbows on my knees.
Jenkins took a moment before he answered me.
“Brad,” he mumbled.
“Alright, Brad,” I started. “I can tell you’re a good person, and I can tell that you’re not happy with the sorts of things your boss does. I could tell yesterday at the auction, too. You didn’t look comfortable being there, so can you tell me what made you so uncomfortable?”
It felt like I was balanced on a high wire without a net, and each step I took brought me further and further away from safety. Each question I asked him was just another chance for him to snap and send me away.
Brad Jenkins shifted in his seat like he was a kid in school, and I was a teacher asking if he’d cheated on a test, and that in and of itself was telling enough about the situation. Finally, Brad looked up at me.
“I can’t talk to you,” he said, which once again wasn’t the sort of response I’d been looking for, but still told me plenty of things.
“Why can’t you talk to me?” I asked despite having a fairly firm grasp on his answer.
Brad glanced around the lobby of the department again with an anxious furrow between his brow before he looked back at me. His shoulders curled forward, and his voice lowered as if he was about to share a secret.
“Sheriff doesn’t like you,” he said the obvious. “And he’s told all of us to keep the lot of y’all away from our department. Not just you, but anybody asking questions. He hates that protestor guy, too, but nobody takes him seriously.”
I could barely even hear Brad over the loud, shaking hum of the air conditioner over our heads, and so I found myself leaning forward to meet him.
“Why doesn’t he want anyone asking questions?” I asked. “What is he doing that he can’t have found out, Brad?”
I didn’t hold my breath for some bombshell answer because in the end, I knew that Deputy Jenkins was just some kid straight out of high school who was too scared to do the right thing.
And as if to prove my hypothesis, Brad gave a firm shake of his head.
“He’ll fire me,” he squeaked out. “I need this job. My dad was a cop, and everyone expects me to be a cop, too. I just can’t get fired, Mr. Landon. And with the election coming up, Sheriff has been real on edge about everything, and if he finds out you were even here at all, he’ll sack me.”
I gave a deep sigh and leaned back in my seat again. It’s not that I had expected to be given the key to the kingdom, so to speak, or to find some massive bombshell that would blow Thompson straight out of the water. Really, even being able to talk to a deputy at all had been more than I’d anticipated, but it was no less infuriating to hit a wall like this thanks to the sheriff’s scare tactics with his more impressionable deputies.
And so, I pushed myself up to my feet and gave a clearly disappointed shake of my head that had Jenkins’ shrinking in his seat.
“If you decide you want to talk, you know where to find me,” I said in lieu of a goodbye. “I know you want to be a good person, and it’s never too late.”
Maybe it was a low blow, but I couldn’t help my frustration at the situation. I was so close to something that I could practically taste it, but it was still too far away for me to touch.
Without another word, I turned on my heels and made my way out of the department and back into the sweltering parking lot.
Chapter 11
As I walked through the parking lot, I glanced over toward Todd’s median and saw that he was already camped out and in position to protest. I gave him a small nod and a wave, but he seemed too in the zone to notice me, and so I just made my way to my car as I tried to organize everything that had just happened into mental folders.
I quickly unlocked the door with the key fob before I slipped into the driver’s seat. Once the door was closed, I sank back against my seat, scrubbed my palms over my face, and let out a long, desperate sigh.
I dropped my hands back into my lap and watched Todd wave a sign to uncaring passerbys while I continued to try and sort through my conversation with Deputy Jenkins.
He had clearly wanted to tell me more than he ended up saying, but I had this unpleasant feeling that he would never actually come forward. Whatever sort of relationship he had with Thompson was clearly based on fear, and I had the sinking understanding that the fear would win out every time in Jenkins’ mind.
I heaved another exasperated sigh before I shifted the car into gear and backed out of the parking lot. The last thing I wanted was to linger for too long and be spotted by one of the less friendly deputies, or even Thompson himself.
There was always the chance that Jenkins would tell Thompson or one of his co-workers that I had been poking around the sheriff’s department, but I found that hard to believe. Jenkins’ didn’t strike me as the sort of person that would go out of his way to draw attention to himself, especially from his boss.
I drove back to the office without bothering to turn on the radio. Instead, I let myself concentrate on all of the thoughts that fought for center stage in my mind.
There was of course the corruption that seemed to follow Sheriff Thompson like some sort of aura, and the seizure of numerous people’s belongings under hazy circumstances. I also had my other active cases to consider, and the next steps I needed to take for each of them. And so my head was so overcrowded that I nearly forgot about my date scheduled for later that night with Clara.
Was I supposed to call it a date, or was it just dinner between friends? I didn’t know, and I hated that I didn’t know. I would never want to be presumptuous and make her uncomfortable if I went
into things with the wrong mindset, but I didn’t want to swing too far in the opposite direction and come off as uninterested.
Sadly, by the time I parked in the lot for Landon Legal alongside Evelyn’s vehicle, I hadn’t come up with any brilliant answers to any of the problems that had taken up a residency in my mind. I knew I needed to focus on the moment, though, and that meant aiming all my attention on what was happening with Thompson and the upcoming election.
I made my way back into the office and was relieved to see that no clients had decided to show up unannounced. We had a full caseload and to prevent Evelyn’s head from spinning all the way around her body, I had put a temporary moratorium on seeing anyone for any reason.
It was an idea that worked substantially better in theory than in practice because I was unfortunately a bit of a bleeding heart, but it had worked for the last handful of days.
I almost called out to announce my presence to Brody and Evelyn, but thought better of it when I realized that it would potentially interrupt one of their calls with the other four people Todd had pointed us toward or another one of our pre-existing clients.
That was, if Brody was even able to get in contact with the rest of the list.
After I slid my keys back into my pocket from where they’d still dangled on my fingers, I walked down the hall toward Brody’s office, just to check. I poked my head in to see him leaning back in his chair facing his window. I once again felt a bit guilty that his view was of the alley, but he didn’t seem to mind much as he propped his feet up on the windowsill.
I couldn’t quite see the phone in his hand, but I saw the curling cord that stretched from the base disappearing behind the chair, and so I made the logical leap that he’d managed to get through to one person at the very least.
I made sure to be quiet as I gave a gentle rap of my knuckles against his doorframe to let him know that I’d gotten back from my little side-quest.
His chair started to rotate back toward me, and his booted feet swung out of the window sill only to land back on the carpet with a dull thump. Brody gave me a small nod and raised his eyebrows in question as if he was trying to silently communicate with me.
I had a feeling that he was trying to get a read on how my conversation down at the sheriff’s department had gone, and I was sure that the thin line of my lips wasn’t a good sign.
He made a small gesture with his finger by looping it in a little circle by the phone receiver cradled to his ear, and I interpreted it to mean that whoever he’d managed to get a hold of wouldn’t quit talking.
I knew it wasn’t the most conducive way to try and have a conversation, but my curiosity had gotten the better of me, and after the failure that I’d had at the sheriff’s department, I needed some good news.
And so I held up my hand and pointed four fingers up for him to see while I raised an eyebrow in question.
It was crude, but I was sure he’d understand the question of ‘did you manage to contact all four of them?’ in the gesture.
Brody seemed to understand because he gave a pleased-looking nod.
Before he could attempt to communicate something else through our rudimentary sign language, he finally spoke to the person on the other end of the phone.
“Thank you again for speaking with me, Tristan,” he said to the person across the line. “I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to share your story with me. Uh-huh… uh-huh. Yes sir… alright now. Uh-huh… goodbye.”
Even after he gave his goodbye, Brody still held the phone to his ear for nearly an entire minute while he shot me a look of absolute despair.
Finally, he clicked the phone back into its cradle, exhaled a heavy sigh, and gave a slow shake of his head.
“He felt like he needed to tell me his entire life story,” Brody said in a way that made me think he really wasn’t kidding. “Starting from conception.”
I snorted out a laugh and shifted to lean in the doorway.
“But he was the fourth person?” I asked with a tilt of my head.
Brody nodded, and the exasperated look on his face was slowly replaced by a smile.
“He certainly was,” he said. “And you’d never believe what he told me.”
“Well, considering what you’ve already said, I assume it started with when a man loves a woman?” I asked with a cheeky grin.
Brody gave a huff but couldn’t quite hide the amusement that danced across his features.
“No,” he said. “Well, yes, but that’s not the important part. All four of the people on Todd’s list’s stories matched up with everything else we’ve heard from the people that claim the sheriff’s department took their belongings without cause.”
My eyebrows shot up toward my hairline. I’d expected one, maybe two more of the people to be what we were looking for. But for all four stories to line up with the three we’d already gathered? It almost made me sick to my stomach.
Crowley was a city of about ten-thousand or so, and seven people wasn’t that many in the grand scheme of things, a little less than one percent of town, but it still felt like too many.
And that was just the seven we knew about.
Sheriff Thompson had been around for far longer than I’d been in Crowley, so how many others were there that he’d been taking from that had gone unnoticed? Not to mention my new suspicion that he was skimming off the top of the funds allotted for the precinct.
That theory wasn’t proven just yet, but given the state of his home compared to the ramshackled department itself, it didn’t feel too insane to think that he’d been dipping his hand into the cookie jar when no one was around to see.
Had he just gotten sloppy, and was that why we were noticing these things now? Had Knox’s downfall been the catalyst for Thompson crowning himself some sort of Mad King?
It felt like the truth, though I’d need more than just a feeling to bring down Thompson. But I was certain that without Knox around to keep a payrolled Thompson in check, the sheriff had nothing to stop him from being flagrantly corrupt.
“How recent are their claims?” I asked after I shook myself from my own thoughts. “Are there any that line up with Knox being taken down?”
Brody’s brow furrowed, and he looked like he hadn’t considered that.
I watched him as he seemed to do the mental calculations, and he looked surprised as he leaned back in his seat and gave a slow nod.
“All of them, actually,” he said in what sounded like shock. “All four said that within the last six months, they’d been slapped with some sort of claim that was clearly unfounded. But they were unable to call out the sheriff’s department on it, and so the deputies simply walked out with anything that was worth any money. All the things that were taken disappeared for good.”
He shifted forward in his seat to rest his broad forearms across his desk while I nodded.
“How’d you guess that?” he asked with raised eyebrows and a cock of his head.
I adjusted my stance in the doorway before I shared my theory.
“I think that Knox was keeping Thompson in check,” I said. “Knox couldn’t risk Thompson putting on a blatant display of corruption, or it might have drawn the attention of someone like the FBI, who wouldn’t back down from some small town sheriff. But with Knox out of the picture, Thompson could do whatever he wanted. Do you know how long Thompson has been sheriff for?”
Brody’s eyebrows furrowed as he tried to follow my jump in the conversation, and then he pursed his lips as he tried to calculate the answer.
“Just over a decade and a half, I reckon,” he said. “But what’s that got to do with Knox?”
I could see a sort of picture forming in my mind that put this entire problem into an unflattering perspective.
I heaved a sigh, because I didn’t like the answer I’d come to.
“And Knox Chemicals was here before he was,” I said before I continued to elaborate. “I think that Knox handpicked Thompson for sheriff. It’s not someth
ing I can prove, obviously, but I think that Thompson was chosen to be Knox’s get out of jail free card, literally.”
I watched as my words seemed to sink into Brody, and he gave a singular, slow nod of understanding.
“And so for sixteen years, Knox kept Thompson on a leash,” I said. “He didn’t need to be a good sheriff, just average enough to not draw any suspicion, because if people started looking into Thompson, they’d be able to trace things back toward Knox.”
“And now Knox is gone,” Brody said as he fully caught onto the theory.
“And now Knox is gone,” I agreed. “So Thompson has no one to keep him in check at all.”
Brody steepled his hands in front of his face with his elbows propped on his desk.
“Shit,” he exhaled the word like a sigh.
I couldn’t agree more with his statement.
“So, because no one is keeping him tethered, he’s started acting like a king,” I said as I continued to speculate about the situation. “He’s started enacting more fraudulent raids, and Tim, the inmate working on his land, said that Thompson only moved into his mansion a few months ago.”
“Which lines up with Knox’s downfall,” Brody finished my thought, and I moved my hand toward him in a low, loose gesture as if to say he’d figured it out.
“This is only going to get worse from here on out,” I speculated. “He’s going to keep abusing his power until someone gets hurt more than they’ve already been hurt.”
“The election probably isn’t helping his temperament any,” Brody added. “What with us starting to snoop around, and his major backer now unavailable for providing funds.”
I gave a small shake of my head.
“No, it probably isn’t,” I agreed. “He thinks he’s in the clear with his new power, and he just has to keep everything going unnoticed until he’s re-elected, and then he’s got four more years to run Crowley into the ground.”
My words hung in the air between us as we both fell silent while they sank in. I could hardly imagine four more months of Thompson in power, much less four years. If he was already this power hungry, I didn’t want to think of how much worse it could get.