The Brotherhood of the Wheel

by R. S. Belcher

  She also had notebooks, measuring tape, a ruler, a pen-size Maglite flashlight, a voice recorder, and a box of latex gloves. Finally, she pushed aside her leather jacket, pulled her duty sidearm—a Glock 22—out of her shoulder rig, pulled back the slide to chamber a .40 round into the pipe, and replaced it in her holster. She exited the car, hefted her bag onto her shoulder, and looked around. It was a quiet, blue-collar neighborhood on a late Monday morning; the place was practically deserted. She locked the car and headed east toward Dewey Rears’s apartment.

  It was a short walk down Askew Street. Lovina walked past neat, well-trimmed lawns with fishing boats on trailers and unhitched campers waiting in wide, two-car driveways. It had warmed up and birds were chirping. The sun was warm on her face and arms. She turned left onto Beech Street and saw the apartments ahead on the left, just past a small building that looked as if it had once been a market or maybe a laundromat but announced that it was presently a barbershop.

  Dewey Rears’s apartment complex was two single-story brick buildings subdivided into five apartments each. There was a small island of cement next to each front door, a larger pad at the back. Large, gray HVAC units crouched like squat, ugly gargoyles next to each rear screen door, humming as they spewed out heat. The five units faced each other across a grass courtyard with two concrete sidewalks, one for each building. The grass hadn’t been cut in a while and swayed slightly in the weak, humid wind.

  Lovina knew this kind of complex very well. She saw the plastic kiddie pools, the aluminum chairs with nylon webbing, and the covered grills. By six tonight, the courtyard would be alive with kids playing and adults gossiping and getting drunk after a long day of backbreaking, soul-crushing work. She had grown up somewhere very much like this.

  She also knew that at least a few little old ladies and disability dukes and duchesses were peeking through shades all day long, snooping. She didn’t have the police report, and the address she had from the hit on the prints didn’t include an apartment number. There were ten mailboxes mounted in two rows of five on aluminum posts at the edge of the virtually empty parking lot, but walking up to them would invite the attention of the apartment’s invisible sentinels. There really wasn’t a good way to do this. She had chosen late morning because she’d have the least exposure. Now it was time to just put up or shut up.

  She pulled her badge lanyard out of her blouse, letting her CID badge and ID hang out around her neck, walked briskly into the courtyard, and saw the door marked with yellow crime-scene tape with a warrant taped up, third on the left side of the courtyard. She walked up to the door and set her leather bag down. Calmly, and as professionally as possible, she took out her small leather case and selected the proper pick and bar that she needed to open the deadbolt above the doorknob. She worked quickly as she could, blocking as much of what she was doing from view. The bolt was old and a little sticky, but Lovina had it open in less than twenty seconds.

  “What chu doin’ there, hunny?” a voice behind her asked. Lovina looked over her shoulder. There was a skinny little black woman standing on the sidewalk behind her, dressed in a pair of turquoise capri pants and a T-shirt that said “Grandchildren Are Angels from Heaven” in bright red, blue, and yellow letters. The T-shirt fell to just above the old lady’s knees. She had on tortoiseshell sunglasses.

  Lovina turned fully so the old lady could see her badge. She palmed the pick and bar. “Morning, ma’am,” she said as blandly as she could. “Just getting some more pictures.”

  “Well, you ass me,” the old lady said, “dat boy had sumthin wrong wi’ him. He always talkin’ ’bout crazy shit.”

  “Did you call the police?” Lovina asked as she opened the door.

  The old lady shook her head as she shuffled forward to try to peek inside the sealed apartment. “Naw, it was crazy old Miss-ess Chalfont down the way,” she said. “She heard all the screaming and commotion and called y’all.”

  Lovina nodded and slipped inside the door. “Well, thank you, ma’am,” she said.

  The old lady shuffled forward. “Been goin’ to hell round here for a spell,” she said. “All those damn kids wandering around, most of them actin’ like they trippin’. I think that boy in there be some kinda of pet-o-phile,” she said. “All them kids beating on his door, day and night.”

  “He had kids coming by to see him?” Lovina said. She had ducked under the tape barrier across the frame and had been slowly pulling the door closed on the old lady, but this stopped her cold. “Like coming in and out? You think he was dealing?”

  “If’n he was, he sucked at it,” the old lady said. “Heard them knocking and calling for him to let them in all hours. He must’a lost customers like that. Did y’all find drugs in there? Never smelled like he was cookin’.”

  “I can’t discuss an ongoing investigation, ma’am,” Lovina said, almost automatically. It was standard copspeak for when you didn’t want to give away how much or how little you had, especially to gossips or reporters. “Well, I best be getting to work, now—”

  “Where your car at?” the old lady interrupted. Lovina smiled her best civil-servant smile and shut the door on the old biddy. This was not how she had wanted to enter the scene, but she was on a clock, and she didn’t have the option of coming in with her mind clear and quiet.

  Dewey Rears’s apartment was dark and still relatively cool in the gathering heat of late morning. It looked like a college student’s flop—stained Goodwill couch and a leather recliner that didn’t match the couch, with bandages of duct tape on it where the upholstery had split. A folding metal chair was on its side on the floor; a small numbered placard sat next to it, a photographic marker for the forensic photographer. An overturned Pabst Blue Ribbon beer can, next to the flipped chair, was marked with another numbered card.

  Something was turning in Lovina’s head as she opened her bag and slipped on a pair of latex gloves—that pinprick of recognition, like the first glowing embers of building a fire. She needed to feed it and attend to it.… There was something here that she had latched on to. Now she just needed to let it grow in her awareness without smothering it to death. Move on.

  There was a huge wall-mounted flat screen, several game consoles, and stacks of video games, cables, and controllers on the floor between the recliner and the TV. Crushed cans of energy drink and Mc-food wrappers were like islands in the sea of worn, dirty carpet. A Star Wars: Episode VII poster was taped to the cracked plaster wall behind the couch with yellowed Scotch tape. Around it were faded newspaper clippings and stock photos of constellations and UFOs. The place smelled of stale tobacco, with a hint of incense and pot beneath the smell. She felt an immediate connection to Dewey Rears—this was like walking into her younger brother Romero’s college apartment. She couldn’t help smiling at the revelation. And then her mind turned to Delephine, as it always did when she thought of family, and the smile fell away. Clock was ticking, time to work the scene.

  Besides the living room dominated by the TV and the video games, there was a kitchen and a bedroom and bath. Lovina began in the bedroom. It was a filthy, stinky mess. Soiled underwear was on the floor, along with dirty clothing and balled-up socks. A teetering mountain of paperbacks, mostly SF and Fantasy, rested on the bed table with his reading glasses and his e-reader tablet. Under the bed were sour-smelling towels crusty with dried semen and boxes of porno magazines and DVDs. Black plastic trash bags were taped to the windows to keep the sun out. Rears’s suitcase was jammed in the corner of his closet. His clean socks and shorts were in their drawers.

  In the bathroom, Rears’s deodorant, toothbrush, and cologne were all where they should be. He had blood-pressure meds beside the sink. The bottle was mostly full. Lovina looked up at herself for a moment in the mirror. She was a dark-complected black woman with strong, angular cheekbones and a haughty, almost aristocratic nose. Her eyes were hazel, the green in them flecked with gold, and they stood out in bright, stark contrast to her skin. Her hair was long, straight
, and black. She favored straight bangs, with her hair falling to her shoulders. Today, she had it in a ponytail under a New Orleans Saints baseball cap. She looked damned good for thirty-five.

  Dewey hadn’t planned on leaving, Lovina thought as she exited the bathroom. He had either been taken or had left his home fully expecting to come back. There were also no signs of any drug possession or manufacture. The pot smell was faint and old. Lovina doubted that he had run out to sell some dope and run into a rip-off, or that someone knew he was holding and came to get the stash. Far from it—nothing about the condition of either door indicated forced entry into the house. Dewey Rears had either allowed his assailants in and they took him or he had left his home willingly.

  There were a few signs that there had been some kind of commotion. The overturned chair and the Pabst beer can … She wished she could get hold of the police report. Maybe she could try to scam the local PD, but, given the politics and the territorial pissing contests of Louisiana law enforcement, it wasn’t likely.

  In a corner of the kitchen, past the sink filled with dirty dishes and the overflowing trash can, was a small breakfast nook that Rears had converted into a computer station and office of sorts. There was a computer hutch, an old, battered gray file cabinet covered in small magnetic tags each possessing a word, and a swivel computer chair that was patched with more duct tape than the chair in the living room. The hutch and the small cork bulletin board on the wall of the small alcove opposite the computer were covered with news and magazine articles. Many of the articles had Rears’s name as the byline. They were all paranormal magazines like Fortean Times and UFO Magazine. On the ledge of the nook’s single window was a small fish bowl with a beautiful blue betta fish swimming about, its regal tail whipping, as it circled a small yellow plastic pineapple house at the bottom of the bowl. She picked up the yellow plastic container of food and sprinkled a few flakes into the bowl.

  The computer tower was gone from the hutch desk, and there was another forensic number placard beside where it had sat. There was no external drive, no USB drives; only the keyboard and the mouse remained. Lovina sighed and then began to look at the piles of paper on the desk.

  Suddenly, she stopped and walked over to the fridge. She opened it. There was no beer inside, no PBR cans like the one found spilled on the living-room floor by the overturned folding chair—not the big leather recliner but the folding metal chair. She searched the overflowing trash can as well. No beer-can empties. The fire caught in her mind: Dewey had company when his visitors came calling. So the local PD was looking for two missing people, or a material witness had managed to flee the crime scene, or maybe his guest was part of the abduction.

  She went back to the office nook. The papers on the desktop were old receipts and illegible scribbled notes. One note was a series of numbers: “39.8282° N, 98.5795° W.” Scribbled after it was “door to the Four Houses. Wyandotte County location ‘reflection’? but not accurate. Don’t think GPS works there. U.S. 36 and 281—Conspiracy of the highway commission? Numerology? Any connection to Metropolis-Utopia??? Ask Ballard?” Lovina shook her head and put the paper back on the desk. Who the hell was Ballard?

  Another crumpled piece of paper was a printout of a photo from the computer. It was blurry, grainy. It looked as if it was taken inside a forest in bright daylight. There were dark smudges, silhouettes of people with no features, just dark outlines, and behind them loomed a towering blur of shadow—arms, maybe—with massive antlers fracturing out from what looked like the head. In the corner of the picture, in Dewey’s spidery scrawl, was “Patient zero? Did this one start the whole thing? Meme? Viral?” She dropped the wrinkled picture back on the desk. You can take only so much crazy.

  Lovina opened the top drawer of Dewey’s file cabinet and froze. Shawn Ruth Thibodeaux was staring back at her—the subject of a photo lying on top of the stack of files in the drawer. Lovina’s heart jumped in her chest. The picture was grainy, and there was a date and time stamp in the corner of it, most likely a capture from a handheld video camera. The girl in the picture had black hair and pale skin. She was looking down, and she seemed to be right on top of the person taking the picture, almost charging them. There was another person in the picture beside her, but all that was visible was part of a clawing hand and the corner of a hooded sweatshirt. She lifted the photo out of the cabinet. It was Shawn Ruth.

  The front door of the apartment crashed open, and two uniformed cops from the Tallulah PD entered, sweeping the room. When the fatter one saw Lovina standing in the kitchen, he leveled his 9-mm pistol at her, as he panted and sweated.

  “Hands on your head! Now!” he shouted. Lovina complied with a sigh. She held on to the photo as she put her hands on her head. “Police!” the other cop, who Lovina didn’t think looked old enough to shave, let alone be a cop, shouted.

  “Yes,” Lovina said. “I am.”

  * * *

  “I don’t give a damn if you brought Huey-fucking-Long back from the dead, lady!” Detective Sergeant Louis Pendalton bellowed across the interrogation table from Lovina. “Or what fucking letters are on your fucking shield—CID? BFD!” Pendalton slammed his bony fist down on the tabletop, making the ashtray, packs of Marlboros, Styrofoam cups of coffee, and files and paperwork all jump and bounce from the force of his anger. Lovina didn’t blink, didn’t jump. She stared at Pendalton like a cobra eyeing up a mongoose. “You come up here from high—and mighty—falootin’ Noo Awle eens, and you proceed to shit all over one of my crime scenes? Your narrow little ass is goin’ in the tank, Foxy Brown!”

  “Sergeant, like I’ve been trying to explain to you and the officers who brought me down here,” Lovina said, “I’m investigating a disappearance related to Dewey Rears. One of the unknown latent prints you got off his front door ran through the state lab, and AFIS rang the bell on a missing-child case of mine.” Lovina held up the photo of Shawn Ruth Thibodeaux that she had found in Rears’s file cabinet.

  Pendalton was a short man, wiry, with huge, hairy forearms, who seemed to exude menace and irritation. He shook his head. “And why didn’t you report in to me, file a supplemental? Make a fucking phone call? Nah, this is some kinda bullsheet ya’ll DCI bastards is playing at. Well, I ain’t playing.”

  Lovina noticed the diamond pinkie ring and the Rolex on Pendalton, and she knew how to play this. “Very well,” she said. Her voice was slate, her eyes locking with the sergeant’s, unblinking, anger simmering in them, but controlled, disciplined anger. “Let’s both stop playing. I am on a DCI investigation at the request of your Division of Internal Affairs. I don’t have to tell you jack shit about it, you backwater cracker cop. You really want to start pissing on an investigation of departmental corruption and a missing snitch, well, then, that’s just fine by me. Puts you at the top of everyone’s list, Sarge.”

  “Now wait one goddamned minute,” Pendalton said, snapping the switch that killed the recorders and the video camera in the surveillance room. “Nobody said nuthin’ about gettin’ up IAD’s ass…”

  Before Pendalton could start sweating too much, there was a knock at the door. Lovina was both relieved and distressed to see her boss, State Police Lieutenant Leo Roselle, walk through the door. Roselle looked the way he always did, always had since Lovina met him, back in 2003, when she started with the New Orleans PD. Roselle was about one generation out of the bayou, a hirsute man with a single bushy unibrow, an olive complexion, and thinning hair. He always wore white seersucker suits and neckties in colors and patterns as vivid as possible. Despite his flamboyant attire, Roselle always looked stern and a little sad. Lovina went to work for Roselle about two years ago, at the state police’s Department of Criminal Investigation.

  “There a reason you talking to my investigator like she’s some skell, Sergeant?” Roselle said as he entered. Another man, black, in a blue PD windbreaker, with a broad face, a shaved head, and a massive build, followed him into the interrogation room. “Maybe you care to explain all thi
s to your chief while you’re explaining it to me?”

  Pendalton opened his mouth and then closed it. He jumped to his feet, obviously ready to make one last stand. “Your invest-te-gator here done broke into a crime scene and contaminated it. Now she’s talking about some kind of IAD-DCI investigation bullsheet!” Pendalton looked to his chief, and the chief turned to Roselle.

  “That true, Leo?” the chief asked. “You and IAD running a game in my house?”

  Roselle looked blandly at Lovina, who remained as unknowable as the Sphinx. He turned back to the chief. “Now, Jim,” Roselle said, “you know the drill. I can’t discuss an ongoing investigation with the principals. I wish I could.…”

  * * *

  Lovina and Roselle walked out of the Tallulah Police Station on Green Street into the cool darkness of an early spring night. Roselle opened the passenger door for Lovina without a word, and the investigator got in. Roselle shut the door and climbed behind the wheel of his dark blue, unmarked State Police Chevy Tahoe. He started the car up. “Seven Spanish Angels,” by Willie Nelson, played softly behind the squawk of his police radio. They had driven out of the department parking lot before Roselle spoke.

  “You want to tell me what the hell you’re doing up here, Lovina?” he said. Softly. “And do not feed me a line of happy horseshit about some secret IAD probe, please.”

  “Pendalton is on the take,” Lovina said. “I can smell it on him.”

  “And catching cops who contribute to the ‘rainy day fund’ is not your current job,” Roselle said. “Hell, you bust all the cops on the take in this state, from parish sheriffs to state police, you wouldn’t have any cops left. ’Cept me and you, of course,” he added in his usual deadpan.