Guilty by Association

by Brad Cooper

  How was I supposed to know that Ray Kessler would suddenly have a conscience attack?

  Sparks stood in the doorway of the police station taking long draws from a cigarette and trying to ingest enough nicotine to calm his nerves. The tactic was failing. No one prepared him for this. Not a single page in the officers’ handbook addressed it.

  “Frank back yet?” Lilly asked, approaching Sparks.

  Sparks exhaled the smoke from his lungs. “Ain’t back yet. He took off after that girl when she left so he must have seen where she went or who she talked to or something.”

  “All the cruisers are still here.”

  “He took the Mustang. Taking a cruiser would be pretty foolhardy.”

  “Alright. You know, we got something else we need to consider here.”

  Sparks blew smoke out of his nose and asked, “What’s that?”

  “We got a body to deal with and we got to explain this somehow. This ain’t New York City. Cops don’t just get shot all the time around here.”

  “Thank you, Carl. Really. I can’t tell you how glad I am that you were here to fill me in.”

  “You know what I mean, Darrell. How do you plan on explaining all this?”

  Sparks again exhaled smoke through his nose and looked away. “It’s not me. It’s ‘we’. I’ll think of something.”

  “That don’t exactly make me feel better.”

  “It will. Just hang on. Where you got the body stashed?”

  “It’s… he’s… out behind the cruiser.”

  “Alright, we need to move him back to where he was before.”

  “I just changed out of my uniform with all the blood on it and all!” Lilly protested. “I heard a siren a minute ago but it stopped somewhere else ‘cause I ain’t heard it in a few minutes.”

  “Then put the things back on! My God, you sound like a five-year-old. Either we move him back or you get to explain a body behind the cruiser… your cruiser… and a bloody uniform that you know nothing about.”

  “Fine.”

  “Just get the uniform back on and let’s get the body moved back. We’ll figure things out from there. Maybe Frank’s found something out by now. The ambulance oughta be here before long. I don’t know what’s keeping them.”

  Lilly snapped his fingers and said, “I’m sorry, Chief. I’ll call now.”

  A furious Sparks glared at Lilly, scoffed, and tossed the cigarette butt into the grass. “Son, your daddy was a smart man and a good cop.” Lilly started to respond but Sparks added, “You must be adopted, “and walked back into the building.

  The last hour of darkness was ending when the high-pitched alarm on Clark’s wristwatch roused him from his unusually light sleep. Adam and Lisa were lying together on a blanket on the floor, his arms around her providing the extra security she needed for the time being. The basement was damp and cool, which meant a pleasant contrast to the summer heat of the afternoon but an unpleasant complement to the already cool temperatures of the early morning. After a long yawn and a quick stretch, Clark quietly rose from where he had been sleeping and crept up the stairs, unlocking and opening the door as quietly as he could. When he walked into the living room, he was relieved to see that there was no sign of disturbance. No one had broken in, nothing had been taken, and none of the worries that come from slightly panicked thoughts had come to fruition. Things were just as they had been before they rushed into the basement.

  His movements were slow and easy, extra care given to the prevention of excessive noise. Moving toward the window on his tiptoes, he peered toward the road through the slightly parted curtains. There was no sign of Frank Amick’s car. The television was off but the power light was still shining bright on the VCR. The cassette tapes in both decks had already been automatically ejected after reaching their respective ends. After removing both cassettes and placing them in protective cases, Clark turned on the desk lamp long enough to label both tapes using a silver permanent marker in lieu of the traditional adhesive paper labels. The labeling was obvious to him but would be easily misunderstood by anyone else who may happen across it before it reached the right people.

  The label read: COPS

  “Not exactly like the TV show,” he mumbled into the silence around him.

  With Adam and Lisa asleep in the basement below him, the entire house was quiet. Some silence was good but this was too much. This kind of silence did not encourage thought, it forced thought. The thoughts in this kind of environment were rarely positive, especially considering the circumstances. Amick was gone but for how long? After what he and the others had done, he had to be fatigued. Was he watching Lisa independently or was he reporting back to the others?

  Clark decided he’d done enough critical thinking for the time being. Thirsty, he walked into the kitchen. Although he wasn’t one to drink, this was enough to make one start. Tonight, however, he would opt for a Vanilla Coke. If he couldn’t have a normal night’s sleep, he would at least have one of his favorite drinks. The caffeine was an added benefit. Ryan could not remember the last time he was intentionally awake at five-thirty in the morning but everything seemed to be out of his control for the time being.

  Amick drove the Mustang into the parking lot as Sparks and Lilly replaced Kessler’s body back into its original location from just after the shooting. They tried to recreate the scene from memory, attempting to position the body just as it had been when it slumped to the ground seconds after the gunshot rang out.

  “Welcome back to the party, Frank. Got anything?” Chief Sparks asked, looking up from his activity.

  “Just what we thought. She took off out of here and went straight to the Clark kid’s house. I wasn’t there ten minutes when the lights went out. They didn’t go nowhere or anything. Guess they just went to sleep.”

  “She took off awful fast, Chief. I bet she seen something. She definitely heard it. Why else would she just hurry off that quick in the middle of the night?” Lilly asked while he looked around.

  “Gunshot woke her up and scared her? Just up and decided she wanted to head back over and spend some more quality time with her man? Could be anything,” Sparks added.

  Amick looked at the other two men and said, “Could be but she still might know something, guys. We heard something over there so she might have been outside. We can’t take a chance on that.”

  Sparks lit another cigarette. His hands shook as he talked. “Just hold on. We’re getting ahead of ourselves, now. Things are done for tonight whether she knows something or not. We need to get this body out of here and get our stories straight. I’ll worry about explaining all this to the Tochigis. Frank, call an ambulance and get it out here. Tell them we have an officer down and all that. Don’t tell them nothing else, understand? Carl, get changed again and go get another firearm out of storage. We’re gonna need that.” He coughed and the tar in his lungs rumbled.

  “I done called the ambulance,” Lilly said. “I heard another siren coming from over yonder a few minutes ago so I’d say that’s ours.”

  “See what I mean? I’m already running things together. Call again and find out what’s keeping them. I’ll call Ron and tell him to keep an eye on the Troopers. Get to work on the rest of it,” Sparks said.

  “You got it, Chief,” both men said as they walked away.

  By 6:30 A.M., the ambulance had come and gone and a fleeting sense of calm had returned. The early hour ensured no live media coverage, although that was just a matter of time. The body was bagged and carted out in minutes, the EMTs satisfied with the officers’ explanation that the evidence had been collected and the scene could be released. Sparks, Amick, and Lilly made their appearances brief around the scene. Anything more would create additional problems, something that was not needed at the moment.

  Charlie Barker, the long-tenured EMT that once responded to the call about Thomas Wyatt and numerous others over the years, was not working and enjoying a night of rest that the chief envied. Instead, a young man and woman, bot
h in their mid-twenties, identities unknown to all of the officers, arrived and showed little or no sense of urgency. They offered only the obligatory greetings and condolences for the survivors of the slain officer and otherwise went about their business undeterred. One of them took the time to half-jokingly ask Amick why there wasn’t a chalk outline on the ground. Amick told him that television didn’t always reflect life in the real world and to focus on doing their job so he could get back to doing his own.

  For Darrell Sparks, feeling drowsy would have been an improvement. When movement stopped it was a battle for him to keep his eyes open. Being awake for more than twenty-one hours in a row was not a problem in his younger days but he was no longer a young man. His body did not recover as well or as quickly at fifty-two as it did at twenty-one. All he desired at the moment was the freedom of sleep but even that eluded him.

  Sparks sat in his office, reclining in his chair as far back as it would allow without toppling backwards. His eyelids grew increasingly heavier before Frank Amick put a stop to his process of falling asleep.

  “Hey, Chief, they finally got everything cleaned up. Just thought you’d wanna know.”

  Sparks blinked several times and shook his head. “That’s great, Frank. Anything else?” he said before yawning.

  Amick stopped chewing his gum and said, “Well, me and Carl was thinking we better get an idea of how to explain this whole thing. Somebody’s going to want to know something soon. This kind of thing don’t just go away, Darrell.”

  “I know all that, Frank. I really do but right now I just need to sleep. I’ve been up much too long as it is.”

  “I came on at the same time that you did, Darrell. Believe me, I’m whipped myself.”

  “Go home, Frank. Tell Carl to get out of here, too. Last thing we need is to get even more sluggish because we got a lot to do today. You two get some sleep and get back in here about noon. We’ll figure everything out then. I’ll call Robbins, fill him in, and get him in here early so we’ll have someone to respond to the calls. I’m gonna go lay on the couch.”

  Amick left the office and headed for Lilly’s desk to deliver the chief’s instructions followed by his drive home for the much needed sleep for which the chief had just given his permission. Sparks made the call to Kevin Robbins, giving him a barebones explanation of the shooting, most of which was improvised on the spot, and told him to come in as soon as possible to provide some much needed relief. They would be operating shorthanded for a while.

  Sparks ran a hand through his dark brown hair and his thumb and index finger over his brush mustache as he yawned, all the while thinking of how wonderful sleep would be for the next several hours. He rose from his chair behind the desk and walked to the couch that sat against the wall on the right side of his office, beneath the only window in the room. It was at least twenty years old, the cushions no longer stiff but now settled in and suitable for the occasional mid-afternoon nap. The fabric pattern was straight out of the 1980s and barely qualified as office furniture.

  He’d been lying on his back for little more than ten minutes and was on the brink of sleep when the phone rang. He sat up with a jerk, frustrated that his rest had been interrupted for the second time in half an hour, and wondered if this is why intelligence agencies use sleep deprivation as an interrogation tool.

  “Spring Creek Police Department. You got Chief Sparks here,” he answered.

  “Chief Sparks, this is Faith Carson with NewsCenter Five. We’ve received word of a fatal shooting involving one of your officers. Do you have time for a couple of questions, sir?”

  “You gotta be kidding me. Already?” Sparks didn’t say. “We are not prepared to comment at this time but the investigation is underway. I can tell you that much,” he said into the phone. He had rehearsed the line for an hour in case any media members made such a phone call.

  “Alright. When can we expect an official comment or an update on the investigation?” the reporter asked.

  “People, I don’t know. We’re just in the beginning stages here. Come on down about four-o-clock or so and I’ll be glad to answer some questions for you.”

  “Thank you very much, Chief Sparks,” Faith, the bubbly reporter, said before hanging up.

  Great, Sparks thought, it’s already started. What’s next? It’s gonna be TV, newspapers, all that business, swarming like locusts.

  Sparks walked to the couch and flopped down out of complete exhaustion. He propped his feet on the armrest and rested his arms behind his head for the moment, waiting for everything to calm down if only for a few minutes. The door to the office opened and Robbins peered through the door.

  “Chief?”

  “Yeah, I’m right here, Kevin. Look, I’m bushed. Answer the calls coming in. If it’s the press, tell them ‘We have no comment at this time’, or something like that, and that we’ll get back to them. I’m going to get some rest for a few hours. If there’s an emergency, wake me up. Otherwise, just let me be for now.”

  “No problem, sir. I’m here if you need anything. We’ll get through this.”

  Robbins closed the door, and Sparks closed his eyes. It was time for much needed rest and, at last, the opportunity had been provided.

  CHAPTER

  9

  Yet another phone call brought Sparks out of his sleep for the second time. He began to rush to his desk to answer it but stopped when he realized that Robbins was at his own desk, working the phones and dealing with the locusts. The next several hours were going to be rough. To be sure, the coming weeks would be rough. Everything was smooth and simple the first time around but Kessler had to listen to the little voice in the back of his head. So many good things had been spoiled by that little voice, Sparks thought to himself. With any luck, although a large one, this would be the only obstacle.

  Robbins knocked on the door before slowly cracking it to peek in. “Come on in, Kevin,” Sparks said, stretching his back sitting upright on the couch before standing to his feet.

  “We had a few calls come in, Chief, mainly about Ray and all that. That last call wasn’t a reporter though. It’s Frank. You wanna talk to him?”

  “Yeah, I’ll take it. Anything else?”

  “No, that’s it. It’s a real shame about Ray though. We know what all happened yet?”

  “Not yet but we’re looking into it. We’ll keep you up to speed. Thanks, Kevin. You have really stepped up here, young man, and we all see it.”

  Robbins closed the door and stepped away as Sparks walked to his desk to take Amick’s call. He pressed the button for line two and picked up the receiver.

  “Yeah, what is it, Frank?” Sparks asked, his elbows on his desk, his eyes closed, still slightly drowsy after his nap.

  “Darrell, you seen the news today?”

  “Actually, no, Frank. I’ve been lying on the couch asleep, which is where I figured you’d be right about now. I assume we’re on it?”

  “Yeah, you could say that. We’re the lead story on every channel, Darrell. They’re kind of pissed that they can’t get a comment from anybody about what’s going on. You need to talk to them before they start thinking something’s up.”

  “Oh, I need to, Frank? I think I know what I need to do and it doesn’t involve letting you tell me what to do,” Sparks said, acerbic and annoyed. “The day I need you to tell me what to do is the day they cart me out of here in a body bag.”

  Amick felt the backlash and turned defensive. “I’m just trying to help, Darrell. No need to bite my head off, boss man. We just need to stay under control. That’s all.”

  “I think I can manage. What time is it?” Sparks looked at his watch, answering himself before waiting on Amick. “Nine-thirty. Get down here so we can figure things out. Call Carl and get him down here, too, if you can wake him up.”

  “You got it. We’ll be in around ten or so.”

  The light for line one lit up on Sparks’ phone. “Good. I’ll see you guys then.”

  Robbins opened th
e office door again. “Chief, you got another call on line one.”

  “If it’s another reporter, tell them we’ll have a comment soon or whatever. I need some coffee.”

  “It’s not a reporter. It’s Hotaka Tochigi and he sounds pissed off about something.”

  Sparks feigned confusion. “Wonder what that’s about,” he grumbled and shrugged it off. “I’ll talk to him and find out what his problem is, if I can figure out what he’s saying.”

  Robbins laughed to himself as he closed the door.

  This was not the call that Sparks was looking forward to, especially not this early in the day. Tochigi almost certainly wanted something that he didn’t have and likely wouldn’t have for at least two more hours, if not more.

  Hotaka Tochigi wanted an explanation.

  Sparks answered the call apprehensively, unsure of how much Tochigi had seen, what all he knew and what his reaction had been. “Konnichiwa, Hotaka,” he said. It was one of a handful of Japanese words that he knew, even though he felt awkward saying it to his Japanese friend.

  “It seems we have a problem, Mr. Sparks. I’m afraid I do not like what I am seeing on television this morning.”

  “About that…”

  “You bring this Ray Kessler into our operation and then he ends up dead? Would you like to tell me what happened, Chief?”

  “Maybe you should come in so we can talk about this, Hotaka. I’m not sure this is something to handle over the phone.”

  Tochigi sighed into the phone before agreeing. “Alright, Mr. Sparks. I will be there in ten minutes but I expect a complete explanation. Sato will not be pleased with this.”

  “I’ll see you then.” Sparks realized that he was now between the proverbial rock and hard place. Tochigi wanted an explanation, and most likely a solution, in ten minutes, but that hardly seemed likely. Old fashioned BS would be the main course for this confrontation unless something changed within those ten minutes.