by Zack Klika
That was two and a half months ago. Nothing to show for it. Conn’s excitement faded over time and gave way to thoughts of Lee’s safety. She often wondered if it was right what she and Johnson were doing, putting a decent guy in harm’s way. Johnson had told her it was better if Lee didn’t know about Neil. She could see the sense in that. She still didn’t feel any better about it.
Johnson lucked out and found front-row parking outside the simple red brick building that sat on the edge of downtown Clarksville. A plaque above the entrance read, “Clarksville Police Department.” Nothing fancy. More buildings, some tall, some short, most of them brick, stretched down the street towards the center of town.
The detectives were placed in the bowels of the building. Not knowing if it was night or day helped most of the detectives work. And it really didn’t smell that bad down there after one of the detectives, a few years back, had the carpet removed and the concrete underneath it polished. It actually made it look more professional.
Four rows of four desks ran parallel to one another, taking up most of the space in the basement. A box of donuts sat next to a coffee maker in one of the corners. A sports broadcaster ran highlights from the previous night’s baseball games.
A handful of detectives were lounging around when Conn and Johnson entered. She got right to work on a report detailing the latest information Lee had given them. She liked this part of the job. Details. They were a detective’s most valuable asset. She learned that at Fort Campbell during her eight years in military police. She also learned when to hold back on the details, especially when it came to cases like domestic abuse. To her, those were the worst cases.
She had lost count of the number of times she showed up to base housing and found a beaten and bloodied wife sobbing outside of her home with a screaming husband destroying the inside of it. The higher-ups wanted to protect their soldiers, so anything related to PTSD was logged with as few details as possible and dealt with internally through that soldier’s company commander. Conn hated it. Being ordered to do the wrong thing made her feel like scum. That was not the case where she was now. She could be as meticulous as she wanted to be with her reports at the Clarksville PD. And she was.
She hit save on the document and stored it in a password-protected unnamed folder.
“You sure he’ll be okay?” she asked Johnson without looking his way.
Johnson kept his nose in his book. “It’ll be routine surveillance.”
She nodded. He was right. If Lee informed them the fights were happening, they would call in backup and arrest Buck. If the fights didn’t happen, Lee would keep on selling drugs to Buck. No harm, no foul.
“I just don’t like sending him in without a wire is all,” she said.
Johnson looked up. “You’re really worried about the little shit, huh?”
“He’s a lot smarter than you think,” she said.
And it was true. Lee was exceptionally smart. Getting caught up by Johnson on his last big drug sale was just bad timing. That money was supposed to be his ticket out. It was going to pay for his last year of college, or so he had told Conn.
“It’d be more dangerous if he went in wearing a wire,” said Johnson, diving back into his book. “You know that.”
Johnson was right. If Lee got caught with a wire, he would be as good as dead. They determined a text message would have to do.
“We’ll have two uniforms with us. He’ll be fine,” Johnson assured her.
Conn nodded. “Okay.”
She pulled up the procedure files for their surveillance mission as Detective Paul Lane approached her desk, dressed in a slim-fit blue suit with a starched white shirt and narrow black tie. He was fifty-three years young with a full head of brushed-back brown hair.
“You hear about that female soldier they found last night?” Lane asked.
Conn shook her head. Johnson ignored him.
“Name was Jennifer Carlson. Some kids found her on the old Fork Creek bridge,” he said as he threw a stack of photos down in front of Conn. She picked the packet up and started to shuffle through them.
The first image was of Jennifer laid out on an autopsy table, every wound visible against her pale canvas. Her hair had been twisted into a bun. Even in death, she had a glow to her.
“Whoever did it,” said Lane, “took a breather in between beating her and killing her. The coroner said the bruises and cuts were a few hours older than the stab wounds and slash across her throat that killed her.”
Not normal, Conn thought. She stopped on a close-up of Jennifer’s face. There were lumps all over it. A fight? Conn wondered. The swelling had gone down, but it still made her stomach turn.
“The coroner also said a few of the bruises and scars were a few weeks old, maybe even a few months.”
Conn focused her attention on Jennifer’s hands. Bruised knuckles. She put up a fight. A hell of a fight. More than once. Whoever did this to her had bruises of their own, Conn thought.
The final picture was a close-up of Jennifer’s chest. Knife wounds all over it.
“They stabbed her eighteen times, for good measure of course,” Lane said.
Unhinged violence. Conn dropped the photos, disgusted with the case that was not even hers.
Unconsciously, Conn said, “Jesus Christ.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Lane said, with a grin that made her skin crawl.
Conn thought about asking him why in the fuck he was grinning, but he was always grinning. She didn’t trust him.
“So she was beaten and then killed afterwards?” she asked.
Lane nodded.
“Was she raped?”
“Nope.”
The only thing that came to her mind was domestic violence. Lane continued on before she could follow the thought any further.
“But the best part is,” he said, “Army CID took the case right off my hands.”
“But it happened off base,” said Conn.
“They picked the body up a few hours ago. Didn’t even want me to show them around the crime scene. Just asked me where it happened and said thanks.”
“And you’re all right with that?” she asked.
“If someone comes to my house and asks if they can have my dog’s shit, I’m not saying no.”
“What?” asked Conn.
“Johnson gets it,” Lane said, nodding to Johnson. Then he picked up his photos and walked off.
After a moment Johnson spoke up. “I don’t.”
Some of the cases Conn encountered were awful. She was still getting used to the fact that there was a different kind of crazy outside of the military. The thing about specially trained soldiers was that they were efficient. If they killed someone overseas, it was usually with a tight shot group somewhere to the face or chest. Even when they came back with PTSD, the awful things they did were efficient.
She remembered a case where a soldier on leave from Iraq choked his wife to death in his sleep. When he woke up, he couldn’t believe what he’d done. He called 9-1-1 and told them what happened and how bad he felt about it. By the time military police arrived he was already dead. A bullet to the head. His two-year-old son was dead as well. Suffocation. Conn imagined the soldier was trying to do the kid a favor by not letting him grow up knowing his father killed his mother, then himself.
One bullet. Three dead. Efficient.
Jennifer’s wounds were anything but efficient.
Not your case. Not your concern, she told herself.
“You’ll learn to cope with cases like that,” Johnson told her.
She was still learning.
Chapter 4
The dilapidated Stop N’ Shop looked haunted sitting against its forested background. Amplifying the image was the canopy of darkness brought on by dusk. It seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. A lot of places did in Clarksville. Lee stood on a ladder, his face under harsh light, and put the finishing touches on a surveillance camera above the front entrance that would, ideally,
stop the recent string of robberies causing the owner to fear for his life. Fat chance, Lee thought.
Below him, holding the ladder, was his coworker and good friend Chris Bonilla. His nickname was Concrete, but Lee could never bring himself to call him by it. As far as nicknames went, it was lacking. He would never voice the opinion, though. Chris was short and pudgy and deadly fast. The few people who made fun of his appearance learned why he was called Concrete. He’d had a promising future in boxing until the drug scene sank its teeth into him. Three years in jail for dealing marijuana set him somewhat straight. He still collected for a few bookies on the side.
“Must be a death in the family,” Chris said.
Lee glanced down at him, caught off guard. “What?”
“You’re never this quiet,” Chris laughed, the oil that had accumulated on his forehead during the day shining brightly.
“Just a lot on my mind,” Lee said.
“Anything to do with the cops that been playin’ you?”
Under the circumstances, Lee did not mind being played one bit. It beat spending time in jail. Chris thought a bit differently. He would take jail time before he ever snitched. Part of his personal code. He didn’t care if other people snitched, though, as long as it wasn’t on him.
“They got me doing some recon shit tomorrow night.”
“You got a piece?”
Lee shook his head. “Don’t need one.”
“I don’t know, man. I’ve seen you throw a punch,” Chris said with a straight face. Lee shook his head and smiled.
He had not thought about taking a gun. Mostly because he hated guns.
By the time they made it back to their unmarked work van, it was past quitting time. The ride back to the True Security Inc. home office was quiet. Chris was cool like that. Didn’t need to talk. Could if someone wanted to, though.
Traffic was sparse. Chris did the speed limit down the stretch of road that ran along the front of Fort Campbell, five miles in all, and hit every green light. About halfway there, Lee thought about seeing if Chris knew anything about the female soldier Danny had mentioned. Chris lived near Fort Campbell in a run-down apartment and often went out for a beer at some of the hole-in-the-wall bars that brought soldiers and civilians together, not happily, but still.
“You hear anything about a female soldier might’ve been beaten up or anything?”
Chris gave him a side glance. “All the time, man.”
“I mean recently. Like last night. Maybe on a bridge.”
“You sound like you’re reading me a scary story. What’s going on?”
Lee shook his head. “Never mind. I was just wondering.”
I shouldn’t get Chris involved in this, he thought. Whatever “this” is.
The rest of the van ride passed by to the steady rhythm of a new hip-hop album Lee had picked up a few days ago. It was from a new rapper named the Science who infused old disco samples into his flows.
Night came on fast. It always did when you weren’t paying attention to it. The gray sky Lee had gazed at just a few hours ago had been replaced by the kind of darkness that made some people contemplate their existence.
Chris pulled up next to Lee’s car.
“I’ll catch you tomorrow,” said Lee.
Before Lee could make it out of the car, Chris stopped him.
“You let me know if you need anything, okay?”
“I appreciate it,” Lee said.
There were some things you didn’t get friends mixed up in. Buck’s after-hours affairs were one of them.
They bumped fists and parted ways.
Lee kept the music low on his way home. Peace and quiet helped him think. His thoughts stayed on Buck. Something awful had to have happened to that woman if Buck reacted that way when Danny mentioned her. He was such a smooth operator. To knock him out of that perpetual state of calm would take a lot.
“Fuck,” he said to no one and everyone.
He pulled out a recorder from his pocket, set it on the dash, and hit play. It started with a whistle.
“Whoop whoop, yeah,” someone yelled.
Lee hit fast-forward on the device. Stopped it. Hit play.
“Shit, that bitch we dropped on the bridge was fucked up. So much for being Army strong,” Danny said, laughing.
Lee could hear himself laughing in the background. It made him squirm. He wondered what Danny meant by “dropped.” Where Lee was from, it could mean a few different things: beat up or drunk and left behind somewhere.
He hit fast-forward again. Stopped it. Hit play. Detective Johnson could be heard now. Lee had him on record yanking him whichever way he wanted him to go. He was sure there had to be some law against that. The recordings were just backup in case Johnson tried to pin something on him. Lee learned a long time ago that you had to watch your back when it came to cops and criminals, especially criminals. It didn’t help that a lot of his friends had records.
The dim glow of a streetlight rested over Lee’s two-story, red brick apartment entrance. He parked in a spot marked “2F” and slid out of the car. As he walked up the exposed metal stairs that led to his apartment on the second floor, the structure clanked and shifted, loose from age.
He fished for his keys, unlocked the door, and shut it behind him. When he flipped the light switch to the right of the door, the living room became basked in a dim red glow, turning it into what looked like a photographer’s darkroom. He didn’t like bright fluorescent lights. Too many blue wavelengths. A paper he read in the Harvard Health Newsletter made a clear case for the disposal of all lights that emitted blue wavelengths, citing health concerns and inefficient sleep patterns for those that spent too much time under them. Empty coffee cups and water bottles littered the coffee table. A textbook sat ajar on the corner of it as well: Introduction to Mechanical Engineering. Brand-new. Lee had promised himself he would only take one semester off while he caught up on bills. That was three semesters ago. The drugs he got caught with, and that Johnson would not be returning, were supposed to be his ticket back into college.
Lee plopped down on his hand-me-down sofa and pulled an Apple laptop from under the couch.
He flipped the laptop open, pulled out his recorder, plugged it into the USB port on the side of his slim work machine, and hit upload. He opened a new search window in the news section of his internet browser. Typed in “Dead Soldier Clarksville, TN.” Hit enter.
A few articles popped up about soldiers who had died over the years in and around Clarksville. He filtered the results to show the newest articles first. The most recent one hit a nerve, and with a wide swing he swiped the coffee cups and water bottles off his table. Things kept getting worse. It wasn’t something you got used to—bad news, that is. He clicked on the article that read, “Female Soldier Found Murdered on Fork Creek Bridge.” The article was written by a local high school student named Shane Bedford who had contributed it to the Clarksville Times. The article was short, precise, and lacked personality. The author was either brand-new to writing or wise beyond his years.
The dead soldier’s name was Jennifer Carlson. Three teenagers found her in the middle of the Fork Creek bridge, bloody from head to toe. He slammed the laptop shut and closed his eyes as tight as he could. There was no hoping that it was all a bad dream, only the realization that he was falling deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole. Buck and Danny murdered her. And if they could kill a soldier, then they could kill him. Before he could fear for his life any longer, there was a knock at the door. It sent a chill down his spine. He clicked his flat-screen television on. A high-definition feed of his front door appeared, coming from the security camera he’d installed a year earlier after a break-in left him without a laptop for two months. The visitor stared straight ahead, oblivious to the fact there was a camera recording everything and everyone that came through the front door.
As Lee ambled across the living room to the door, sidestepping the cups and bottles from his recent fit of fury, he let the day�
�s troubles melt into the back of his mind. His visitor had that effect on him. Stopping at the door, he peered through the peep hole and smiled at the fish-eye view of the person on the other side who hated waiting but would have hated being filmed even more. He opened the door and came face-to-face with Conn. She strode in. No invite needed.
Chapter 5
The office of the Fort Campbell Daily was dismal. It occupied a single-story cinder block building that was built around the ’70s. Barracks and other office buildings could be seen in every direction. Inside Riley’s office, there were a few high windows along one of the walls that let in a bit of the moonlight. Below the windows were a few computers sitting on old tables.
At a table in the corner, a lamp shined above Riley’s head as she looked over photos from the change of command ceremony earlier that day. She had to pick one for the following day’s digital issue. In a chair next to her was Tim Pate, her editor, coworker, and senior by thirty years. Technically, he was not her boss since he was not in the military. She complied with and respected his decisions all the same.
Tim had been with the paper for ten years. Before that he was in the Navy for twenty years. He had many roles during that time. The largest saw him fit to take command of broadcasting for the entire European public affairs office. An impressive man all around. He once told Riley he ended up in Clarksville by randomly picking Fort Campbell out of a hat after retirement. The hat was his wife’s idea.
Riley and Tim were two of five who worked for the paper. It was five past nine and everyone else had gone home for the night. She preferred the current work environment. The other people whom she worked with were military wives who stayed chatty and wrote uplifting articles for the spouses stationed on base. Riley never cared much for their frivolous conversation. Or the kind of articles they wrote. She never understood why they thought she would want to hear about their husbands’ promotions and their children’s grades in school.
“How about this one?” she said, holding up a photo that looked like all the others: a captain at the head of a thirty-person formation, close to twenty faces visible from the angle the photo was taken.