Measure Twice

by J. J. Hensley

  Lambert took a deep breath and sized up the man across from her. Maybe she was not being completely fair to him. From what she knew of Jackson Channing, he was a good guy who did not shy away from tough assignments. She had to consider that her abrasiveness was unwarranted, but she had learned to be watchful. She had come too far in her life to let her ambitions get derailed by yet another white man in the department who had no idea what it was like to have to break through multiple glass ceilings. However, she had to admit, this guy had a sense of sincerity about him that most men in the department lacked.

  With some amount of hesitation, she said, “The lower level of a parking garage on Forbes. He had a space there for when he was visiting the Council Chambers.”

  “So he was working yesterday.”

  “Yeah. The council was scheduled to have a session and a vote at four o’clock. It looks like Culligan parked his car and got ambushed. The day-shift guys found blood everywhere next to, and on, his car. It was pretty messy.”

  “Witnesses?”

  “None. And no cameras on that level, but there are cameras recording vehicles going in and out of the garage. The disc is back at my desk. I was going to go over it tonight.”

  Channing nodded. He was freezing. A minute earlier he was fine. Great, he thought. Sweating outside and freezing inside. The burnt taste from the coffee got stronger.

  “Do you mind if I watch it with you?” he asked.

  With a shrug, Lambert mumbled, “Suit yourself.”

  “Did anyone report Culligan missing? His wife?”

  “He didn’t have any close family. Divorced. Lived alone. His ex-wife and adult son were notified. Neither of them had talked to Culligan in weeks. Terio went out there. He said they didn’t seem too torn up when they got the news. Councilman Hatton called Chief Blakely this morning. He said all the council members were surprised when Culligan didn’t show up. Apparently, the guy had a thing about punctuality. He was OCD about it or something. None of them called the police, but Hatton said that he did try to call Culligan’s cell phone. The forensics guys found a cell on Culligan when they processed the body. There were three missed calls from Hatton.”

  Now, Channing felt hot again. A few more minutes and he would have to escape to the bathroom and dig out his flask to steady himself.

  “Before I left the bridge this morning, I asked the zone sergeant to have his guys comb the area for surveillance and traffic cameras on the surrounding buildings. Did they have any luck?”

  “No traffic cam on the bridge, but the stadium had cameras on the north end of the bridge and there is a camera on the south end, keeping an eye on a rental car place. It captures part of Sixth Street leading up to the south end of the bridge. I have all of those recordings at my desk, too.”

  Channing perked up a bit.

  “That’s great! We can compare the footage from the parking garage and the two cameras around the bridge and see if the same car shows up in both of them.”

  Lambert took a pen, scribbled something in her notepad, and then said, “Did the sarge tell you about the holes?”

  “Yes. I assumed they were gunshots, but he said they were puncture wounds.”

  Clicking the pen in her left hand, she simply responded with another, “Uh huh.”

  “Any idea when the medical examiner will have more information for us?”

  She was partially absent now. After a beat, she responded with, “Na. Probably tomorrow.”

  Channing watched as Lambert clicked her pen three more times and kept her gaze on her notepad. What was she thinking?

  He moved on to his next question.

  “Forensics?”

  “Probably a preliminary report tomorrow. High-profile. They’ll put a rush on it, but the lab work and final analysis will take some time.”

  The young detective gave three more clicks and finally put the notepad down. Whatever was on her mind seemed to have resolved itself for the time being.

  Looking at Channing, Lambert refocused on the task at hand.

  “The man was a politician. I’m sure he pissed some people off, right? I figure we should talk to the other council members, find out who he screwed over, and see if he received any threats. The department doesn’t have a record of any, but maybe the council didn’t call them in.”

  “So, you don’t think this was random? Maybe a robbery gone bad?” Channing asked.

  Anger appeared in the younger detective’s eyes again. Maybe she had misread this guy and he was just like the others.

  “Are you kidding me? Is that supposed to be funny?”

  Channing shook his head, confused. Was he that out of touch when it came to dealing with other people? He did not seem to be able to get a read on this woman. She had only been with the squad for a few months before Channing went on leave. He did not have much of a chance to get to know her, so maybe she was always this bipolar.

  “No. I’m not kidding. And I’m not being funny. I really want your opinion.”

  “A fucking City Councilman gets his lungs punctured, his throat gashed open, and then suspended from a bridge in the middle of downtown for God and everyone to see, and you’re asking me if it’s random?”

  For the first time that day, Channing smiled. Maybe being partnered with this woman would be a good thing. He would just have to keep trying to find their common ground and have a little faith.

  – – –

  Tedla Abdella did not deserve this. He had overcome too much, come too far, to have this be his closing chapter. When people referred to him, they used terms like “The American Dream” and talked about the “land of opportunity”. No, he did not deserve this.

  At the age of eight, he and his family escaped the war-torn country of Eritrea. By the age of eleven, he had learned English. By sixteen, he was at the top of his class. By eighteen, he received an academic scholarship to Carnegie Mellon University. Upon graduating with two degrees from Carnegie Mellon’s School of Engineering and Public Policy, he was primed to hook up with one of the big computer companies in Silicon Valley. When the Internet bubble burst, he got into land development. When the housing bubble burst, he looked for a more stable profession.

  In the eleven years he served as the Executive Director for the Pittsburgh Housing Authority, he accomplished a great deal. The city was a model of revitalization and renovation. The city’s low-income housing was not going to be mistaken for affluent subdivisions, but they were not the dangerous slums that existed at the beginning of his tenure. Having risen out of poverty, he enjoyed helping those who wished to do the same. He knew his heart was in the right place. Even if he had to bend a few rules or cut a few questionable deals, it was all for the greater good. The new Housing Authority office building near the North Shore was just one example of how far the agency had come.

  A subdued tapping brought him back to the present. Not a tapping, but the sound of drops of liquid striking unsympathetic cement, their rhythm reminiscent of a lethargic metronome keeping the beat of an unnamed, doleful song.

  Blood from his fingertips dripped down to the floor. He was not sure where he was, but he knew he was in trouble. He assumed someone would find his car on the gravel road near his secluded North Hills home. His wife would call the police when he did not show up by…when? Seven? Eight? What time was it now? Was it even the same day?

  Abdella had been slightly surprised to see the old white van with the hood up blocking the narrow road near his home. There were only a few homes off that road and he knew all of the residents and their cars. Knowing nobody in that section of the North Hills would be caught dead driving a heap like that, he assumed that one of his neighbors must have hired a contractor of some sort. He envied whatever neighbor was able to get a contractor out this way on a Saturday evening. From the looks of things, the van had broken down and the driver was not able to pull off to the side. No big deal. Abdella, on his way back from his usual Saturday massage, would help the smiling man who stood next to the vehicle push
it off to the side.

  When Abdella had positioned himself behind the van in order to push, he called up to the contractor who had gotten in behind the wheel and told him to release the brake. When the man did not answer, Abdella peeked around the driver’s side of the van and yelled again. He had expected to see the contractor’s face in the side view mirror, but all he saw was the headrest of the driver’s seat. Abdella yelled again, confused. The man did not appear to be in the van anymore. The head of the Housing Authority started to take a step forward in the direction of the driver’s door, but a small voice in his head told him to stop. He felt a twinge of panic and a quick burst of adrenaline; maybe it was the remnants of some overly developed sense of survival he still carried with him from the homeland. His feet hurt. It was an unusual thing he remembered from his childhood. His feet always hurt when his guard suddenly went up.

  Abdella slowly stepped backwards, retreating to the back corner of the van. He kept his eyes forward, hoping that the driver would reappear in the mirror. When Abdella’s retreat took him past the rear taillight of the van, he tensed up and saw a flurry of motion to his right. That was the last thing he remembered prior to waking up in this room.

  Whatever the man had hit him in the head with was heavy and effective. Now, tied to this old wooden chair by what seemed like entire spools of fishing line cutting into his wrists and ankles, he again wondered what he had done to deserve this.

  The man from the road did not look menacing. Abdella knew what evil looked like. Even though he was young at the time, he remembered seeing the faces of evil. They bore bloodshot eyes filled with rage and carried rusty machetes. Yes, he knew what evil looked like. This man did not have the look. In fact, at the time, the man had looked…serene. He looked…dead calm. Coming to this realization, the prisoner felt something hard form in the pit of his stomach. He suddenly felt very sick. This was not evil that Abdella had seen before, but it was, in fact, a deliberate evil. The man who had posed as a contractor was standing at a workbench with his back to Abdella. And was he…was he whistling? Abdella thought he recognized the tune. Something with a title like That Old Time Religion. The clinking of metal parts echoed in what could have been a basement. Wait, Abdella thought. It was a basement. He knew this place.

  The man, still whistling, turned toward Abdella. Only the lower part of the stranger’s torso was visible. The only source of illumination was a portable, battery-powered light in the corner. At first, the man from the Housing Authority could not make out the other man’s face, but he knew it was the same man. He sensed it. The man held a long piece of black metal in each of his hands. Behind the hands, a large knife was sheathed and tucked into the front of the man’s pants. The stranger stopped whistling and took three slow steps forward, removing his face from the darkness. Not only did Abdella know this place, he knew this man. It was the same man from the road, but now the mustache and long hair under the baseball cap were missing. The prisoner searched his memory for the man standing before him. His captor spoke two words that told Abdella where he was, and why. It only took a few seconds for him to realize who the man was and what would come next.

  Now, Abdella knew exactly what he had done to deserve this.

  Mayton had thought about this moment for over a year. He thought about what he would say to Abdella when the time came. From the look on Abdella’s face, nothing needed to be said. The man this city celebrated as an American success story understood now. He knew he was going to die. The only thing he did not know was what Mayton was going to do to him after he killed him. Mayton took five more steps toward Abdella, leaned down, and quietly told him. He told him everything. He told him how he was going to kill him and the disgrace that would follow. When Mayton stopped speaking, it was then, and only then, that Abdella started screaming. Mayton did not try to silence his victim. Nobody would hear him. He had faith. It was God’s will.

  Step 4

  We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

  C hanning and Lambert spent the rest of the evening tracking down and interviewing various city council members, none of whom was particularly helpful. Each council member was eager to express condemnation of the murder of Nicholas Culligan and affirm the city’s government would stand together in the aftermath of this horrible attack on one of their own. Each member was also quick to state that they did not know Culligan well, and while they could not imagine anyone wanting to harm him, they were oddly adamant that they knew nothing of his personal dealings or non-council-related activities. By the time the detectives finished, they had the impression that the murdered councilman would not be missed by his colleagues, regardless of what was said when cameras and microphones were present.

  By ten o’clock that same night, Channing and Lambert sat in a dimly lit conference room at the station, eating Chinese take-out while watching the video recordings from the parking garage and the areas around the Clemente Bridge. Although they had put in a full day’s work, the hollow sentiments conveyed by the council members left the investigators with a void they needed to fill. They needed a lead. Any lead.

  First, they watched the recording from the entrance of the parking garage. It did not take long to find the portion of the recording where Culligan had driven into the structure. From there, they decided to start their review from one hour prior to his arrival to one hour after. They were operating on the assumption that whoever killed Culligan would not want to wait too long in the garage, out of fear of being noticed. Another assumption they had to make was that, if the killer drove Culligan’s body out of the garage, he or she would not sit around for too long after the killing, especially considering the noticeable amount of blood around the councilman’s car.

  They watched the garage video together several times. Dozens of cars entered the garage during the timeframe they had designated. Even though the camera was perched at such a high angle that passengers were not visible and license plates could not be seen, the detectives did their best to jot down the makes and models of each of the vehicles. On two occasions, Channing tried to make conversation with Lambert. On two occasions all he got back was an icy, “Uh huh.”

  It was after midnight when they moved on to the recordings from the south side of the bridge. The image quality was exactly what one would expect from an old rental car company. Not surprisingly, the camera angle had been adjusted to keep watch over the inventory of cars, but at the top of their monitor, the detectives could see some traffic moving along Sixth Street. Lambert fast-forwarded the recording to 8:30 p.m. The detectives had discussed the timeline and decided that since the first call about Culligan’s body was a 9:03 p.m., going back about thirty minutes on the recording would be logical. They doubted a body could dangle off the bridge for more than a few minutes before someone noticed, so whatever vehicle transported the body would have mostly likely passed through the area just prior to and after the first call to 9-1-1.

  Repeating the process of viewing the garage video, Lambert and Channing started taking note of what vehicles passed by on the monitor. Not knowing which direction the killer had driven from before depositing the body, the detectives had to account for vehicles driving both north and south. Much like the garage video, the angle of the camera only allowed for general observations and did not reveal license plate numbers or any views of inside the cars. Lambert let the recording run until the time stamp hit 9:15 p.m., then stood and hit the stop button.

  Arching her back in a prolonged stretch, Lambert glanced at a clock on the wall as she asked, “Want to check our notes against the garage video now or do it all after we look at the recordings from the north side of the bridge?”

  When no reply came, she turned, expecting to see Channing, but was surprised to only find a rotating desk chair. She looked across the squad room and caught a glimpse of the senior detective’s back as he quickly walked to the men’s room. At each end of the chair’s black armrests, Lambert could discern fading hand prints left over from Channin
g’s perspiration.

  Channing received a glare from his partner when he returned to the conference room. His cheeks looked flushed.

  Meekly, he said, “You made the right call with the Hunan tofu. The General Tso’s chicken isn’t quite right.”

  Lambert’s expression left no mistake that she was less than impressed with her new partner. The judgment she wordlessly conveyed made Channing wonder if everyone viewed him similarly. How far had he fallen in the eyes of his compatriots? If they were all using the same mathematics that he was when trying to assess himself, then the equation was simple: Jackson Channing ≤ 0.

  Channing made a pathetic, but ultimately successful attempt to change the unspoken subject.

  “Do you think we should check our notes against the parking garage video now or wait until we look at the other tape?”

  Lambert waited a few ticks before responding with an obviously condescending grin.

  “I just asked you the same question, but General Tso interrupted us.”

  The former All-American runner broke eye contact and stretched by swiveling her torso back and forth. She had obviously stayed in shape since her days competing at Duquesne University, where at one time or another she had run every event from the sixteen hundred meter to the three thousand meter. By her senior year, she had even participated in the Olympic Trials at the longer of the distances, but quickly discovered that she had reached her potential and any Olympic dreams were unrealistic.

  She finished her stretching. “Let’s look at the last video and then start cross-referencing vehicles.”

  Channing nodded. He felt sick again, but this time it was simply an overwhelming feeling of depression associated with discovering how weak he had become. He wondered if he had ever been empathetic to others who felt like this—those that had addictions; the ones haunted by demons they could see, but not fully understand. Was this some sort of karma? A reckoning for his sins?