Jury of Peers (3 page)

Chapter Three

Impetus

“This is nice.”

“Yeah.  No doubt.  What’s this guy do again?”

“Dunno.  Computers I think.  This is going to be some kinda bad,” Finn said.

“Prolly,” Tonic agreed as they stepped into the foyer.

The two men stood in the open space only long enough to catch the unpleasant and never familiar smell of a violent death.  A trio of paramedics was collecting their gear, packing up without a word while a uniformed cop stood, hands on hips, looking down the hall. 

Finn cleared his throat with no visible effect on the cop.  “Hey,” he said finally, “what’s the deal?” 

The cop turned, his eyes distant.  He wet his lips, gathered himself up, then walked over to the front door.  “Dan Meyer,” he held out his hand and Finn took it.  It was trembling, and he looked truly relieved to have them there.  "What took you so fuckin' long man?"

"We headed over to the ER first before the husband got all doped up.  Sorry, dude," Tonic said with unfeigned sincerity.  No one wanted to be trapped in a mess like this one.

“Alright.…”  The cop looked around the lofted living room as he started the narrative.  "Looks like somebody came in through the back," he waved in the general direction.  "Shot and killed a little girl, shot her mother, smashed in the dad’s face.  Mom and dad are in route now," he glanced at his watch then shook his head.  "You said they were already there right?"  He sighed, "The girl is still over there.  Fuckin’ awful day.”

Finn looked the cop over.  They’d met about two weeks ago over a hooker that had shot herself in the foot.  Her screeching was a little distracting, but he remembered this guy's face clearly enough.  He certainly wasn’t green, but he
was
all bent out of shape.  Finn looked at his partner and they shared the thought. 

“Killer wasn't real careful,” the cop went on, “I’d bet on finding prints and probably… other stuff too.”

“Other, meaning what exactly?” Finn asked as his partner began a walk around.

“The blood on the floor, well, I dunno.  I’ve seen messy shit before.  Sure as hell they raped the mother."

Finn clapped him on the back and the guy walked off without a word… mid–sentence.  He didn't turn around, just disappeared into the kitchen where the paramedics were talking in hushed tones. 

Finn stood in place for a moment and then walked out the front door and into the driveway.  Near the mailbox, he took in the neighborhood, and then turned back toward the home.

The pathway lighting came on as he watched.  It flickered along the perimeter of the foundation and then illuminated the front of the house with a dozen or more soft beams.  A handful of other homes joined the light show as he stood there in the wind.

             
This was a fairly high–end spread.  It was about five-thousand square feet shy of being an honest–to–god mansion.  About ten thousand more than he’d ever live in, and the truth be known, way more than he’d ever really want.  But it was nice – well built and in a good part of town.  He noticed neighbors braving the weather from their clean, well–lit porches as they wondered how their property values would be affected.

Maybe it wasn't that nice. 

These folks probably thought they were buying some security, a nice house with good people next door, away from all of the shit that they saw on the news.  Quality schools.  Alarm systems.  Big trees.  He took a deep breath of the suburban air.  The Coroner’s pickup would pull up soon along with the chronically overworked CSI crews, and then the porch dwellers would retreat inside, satisfied to peek from their arched windows… and check on the kids.

Two additional police cruisers had pulled up along the street, their red and blue strobes ruining what little calm was left outside.  Presumably these were the reinforcements that would rescue Meyers from himself.

              Tonic appeared at the back door and worked his way down the bricks of the custom made driveway, the beam from his flashlight preceding him.  He paused, squatted down, and peered at the foundation.  He looked up.  “Cigarette here.”

             
Finn walked over.  “I know that cop, Meyers.  He seems a little outta whack, eh?” 

             
“Yeah, no shit,” Tonic popped the butt into an evidence bag.  “He was there with the hooker right?”  He held the bag up to the light.  “I’d say this was a fairly unfiltered sort of cigarette wouldn’t you?”

             
Finn nodded, “I thought pot made you mellow.”

             
“Well it made these guys into assholes.”

             
“Best guess?”

             
Tonic stood and stretched.  “At least two, both pricks.  And they’re way ghandi.  Feels like a jump–in to me or maybe a suburban guy that tried to score some ice from the wrong dudes.”  He looked into the darkening sky.  "Helicopter coming."

             
Finn looked too, listening for a few seconds.  Nothing.  "You're a freak you know.  There's no helicopter."  Finn didn't hear the thing for another thirty seconds as per usual. 

"Okay… so this doesn't seem like anything fancy.  Anything inside to substantiate that?”

              “Why ya think I’m out here?” Tonic gestured with the bag for him to follow.  “Busted the back door, but it wasn’t locked.  Looks like the alarm was tripped from inside.  Panic button.  We’ll check with the company…. A rep’s on the way out I'm sure but, big deal.”  He stepped through the door and up into the kitchen.  “There’s a 911 call, no word on what was said yet."

             
“Struggle here,” Finn pointed.  A long rug was twisted off of the sticky runners that had held it in place.

             
“Yeah, started here looks like,” Tonic pointed.  "But it ended there.”  He stopped short of the hallway and let Finn pass.

             
The little girl was there, naked from the waist down, broken and askew.  There was no peace in this hallway and there never would be.  The stench was raw, vividly carnal.  Her blood had pooled, been struggled within, and then re–pooled once again after she’d been killed.  Finn stepped along the edge of the hall.  Blood, vomit, and urine spread across his path, creeping along the floorboards and seeping into the wood.

             
“What’s all this shit say?” he swung the beam of his light across the wall and cocked his head.  Spray paint dripped, a circle and some numbers.

             
“More tags.  I’ll have somebody take a look at ‘em.  I can’t keep all the gang stuff straight.  We’ll get pictures.  Prolly though, it’ll be a big bunch of nothin’.   The weapon was probably a nine or a forty Smith from what it did.  We’ll probably get fragments out of the surgery, and the one in the floor under the girl.  Not that it’s gonna matter much.”

             
Finn understood and skipped to the next question even as his mind worked on the next one, “What kind of pistol has a two round clip?”

             
Tonic nodded.  “Yeah, I know.  You mean why’d this Meek guy live if someone had a gun and was all stoked to use it?”

             
“Two guns.”  They stepped out of the hall reflexively, moving toward the fresh air of the back door.

“Possibilities.”  Tonic flipped up his middle finger at Finn and counted it off.  “Jam?”  Another finger, “Cheap ammo, there's plenty of that around.  The second gun?  Dunno…. Maybe it was a magazine, carrying an extra clip isn't a bad idea.  Maybe it was a pair of sunglasses, something the kid lifted out of the house, a phone… fuck, who knows?  Besides, he’s all busted up in a funky way.  If he was trying to play it off like a hit of some kind, he did good.”

“Was it?” Finn asked.

“Well, I’d say it was pretty far out to think that this guy ordered a hit on his family, but since he
did
somehow live through it when everyone else took a bullet for their trouble, yeah it’s a
possibility
.”

             
“I’ll check on his finances, policies, all of that, but I bet it comes up clean.”  Finn checked that one off in the book.  “What else?”

             
“Gloves."

             
“Yeah that bugs me too,” Finn replied.  “That was the straight shit, and it wouldn’t be the first time we’d seen bangers be semi–smooth, but it'll mean that we have about zero to go on.  It’s still early, we still might get a hit on some prints.”  Finn checked off several more ideas and then circled the last few that he'd jotted into the margin. 

Tonic ran his hands through his hair and left it in its customary mess, “I’d say this was all about probability.”

Chapter Four

Introit

Seth woke up on the floor, his face against the cool tiles just as the lights came on with an intensity that only served to further disorient him.  He could hear himself screaming, but even then it was dying away in his throat like water gurgling down a drain.  He had edged away into a brittle sleep, the claustrophobic sort that drugs bring, and had found himself trapped within his mind, unable to wake, and yet fully aware of the nightmare that played out before him. 

             
“I thought I could walk,” he said as the nurses converged.

             
“You don’t need to walk, you need to sleep,” one of the pair said in her middle of the night voice.  “Scared the life right out of me.”

             
“I thought I could walk.  I need to see my wife.  Please.”

             
The two counted, lifted as one, and brought him back around to his bed.  He sat there, steadied by their gaze, and touched his face.  It was foreign to him, studded with sutures and smooth with swelling.  Hot. 

“Please.”

              “Let us go ask,” one said.  “You stay put, and we’ll find out for you, alright?”  They lowered him back and began to reset the monitors.  They knew all about his wife but needed time to agree on the wording.

             
“Please,” he repeated as they stood in the door and conferred with one another.

             
Seth watched the clock until the nurses parted and a doctor entered the room.  She stood over him, looming in the light from the hall.

             
“Mr. Meek, my name is Sam.  I've been working on your wife from the beginning.  She's alive but she’s also in a tough spot.  It’ll be awhile until we know much more I’m afraid.”

             
“She’s pregnant.”

             
“I know."  Her eyes told the tale.  "We weren’t able to save the baby.”

             
The void closed in over him once again. 

             
“We’ll know more in the next few hours.”

             
He nodded.

Chapter Five

Insipid

             
Hack dropped his pencil. 

He didn’t write with it, he chewed on it, and when he was working there were usually tiny bits of yellow #2 imbedded between his teeth.  He chased the growing irritation away with a swig of cold coffee and glanced at his cigarette, untouched since the first drag.  It teetered on the edge of his desk, the fragile curve of ash its only anchor.

              He knew how the butt felt.

             
He had cut his teeth on the closing of the Viet Nam war.  Journalism then had been like eating in Vegas, cheap and in bulk – it was a whole new world of reality where soldiers and politicians couldn’t hide from their actions.  The world couldn’t get enough of the first hand reports, and this was doubly true of the second hand spin offs that seemed to fuel the endless debate and speculation that
were
the 60’s. 

College had always been in his plans; his family had seen to that, but the threat of "service" in the jungles had focused his desire to ensconce himself in a profession that, were he to be called, would keep him as far away from the Viet Cong as possible. 

He wasn’t a coward like his friends who moved to Canada – and he wasn’t stupid, either.  His family was here, and they had the money.  He was just pragmatic.  Why get killed for nothing when there was so much to live for?

So journalism seemed a safe route.  And it had been.  Safe
and
profitable.

There were no jungle patrols for Irving Hack, then just nineteen years old, and the easy fame and high–end paychecks for a no holds barred reporter was a narcotic without equal.  Unfortunately, the war had ended.  Still, in those blissful years of playing without a net, Irving had learned that he needed neither caution nor restraint.  He was untouchable.  He gambled with his money, his career, and his friends as if they were all easily replaced, because they were.  He blundered along, shielded by old connections, fueled by a vast stockpile of hundred dollar bills, expensive vodka, and the ever present knowledge that he was able to create the news that people wanted to read.  There was no fear.

He swung his focus to civil rights and civil unrest after foreign jungles had become lackluster in the public eye, but such editorials were increasingly lost in the miles of film on the cutting room floor: journalistic television had come into its own after its powerful debut in South East Asia, become emboldened throughout Cold War, and as of the 1st of June, 1980, it had instantly evolved from thrice daily to all day, every day.  Television news was a juggernaut the likes of which the world of print had never imagined, but even television had to yield to seeds planted during its own infancy.  Packet switching technology had come on the scene with unintended stealth.  Quite simply, no one cared that two computer geeks could make their computers talk between UCLA and Menlo Park.  That was in 1970.  By 2010, there were more than two billion people doing exactly the same thing but at vastly exaggerated rates, and with greatly exaggerated expectations.  Hack had lived through it all, teetering back and forth from one sensation to another before finally finding his niche.

             
Now he stared at his computer screen and rolled the mauled pencil between his palms.  “Fuck," he breathed.  He leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head, and gave himself a spin with his foot to survey his little kingdom.  As the chair reluctantly rotated his girth, he smiled at his surroundings.  He'd worked hard for it, broken many a scandalous story, ruined many of the undeserving, and above all, played the game well.  He'd survived the technological onslaught, and he'd done it with good old–fashioned writing.  The money and connections had helped, but his syndicated column didn't spontaneously appear each week if he didn't sit in this very chair and churn it out.  And scandals didn't happen of their own accord either, not all of the time anyway.  As in Viet Nam, sometimes they had to be… engineered.

He had learned that to survive he had to flirt with an audience that begged for sensationalism, manufactured intimacy, and lurid details – an audience that could now choose from such an enormous pool of potential news sources that they were effectively unable to grasp truth or fiction, spin or wag.  In retrospect, it was really quite easy to do what he did.  Everything had been easy and now he had a way to keep making enormous amounts of cash in the manufacture of truth.

In 1978, just as the little John Hancock Standard newspaper and it's ailing administrative staff was about to be blotted out by the insurgence of new media, Hack had stepped in and purchased the entire organization – the deteriorating building (which had once been a local drive–through bank branch), the now ancient presses, and the equally ancient staff (all of whom left within six weeks of his inception).  Initially, it was, perhaps, an honest attempt to create something on his own, a way to sow his own journalistic seeds.  Though as the little rag was resurrected each year with a fresh injection of his own money, honesty and integrity became less and less appealing – the whole notion became rather boring.  A decade of slowly diminishing returns, hell,
no
returns, was enough to flush the fleeting idealism from Irving's veins.  His whim had become a side project, and then lapsed into little more than an annoyance as he went on ski trips and bought new cars.  He'd realized one evening as he sat in the little building and tried in vain to wax nostalgic, that the reason for its ultimate failure was because it had become a reflection of his own life.  He'd known it for a long time.  Running a newspaper on the up and up was hard fucking work.  Integrity slowed everything down.  Being politically neutral was an absolute impossibility in D.C. regardless of what Uncle Cronkite might have wished to the contrary.  He finished a bottle of vodka that evening there in his chair – the same chair that he was in now actually – and had an epiphany.  The Standard wasn't useless at all.

Hack would use the organization to maintain his reputation as… what?  A man of honor perhaps, the last of a dying breed in a world of corruption and outrage?  Something stupid like that.  The Standard would be his front for news that no one wanted to read, while he tapped his contacts, old and new, for stories that would bring the nation's attention fully upon him.  A lofty goal to be sure, but also one that Hack knew that he could pull off.  He had the favors to call in and he had the fucking money to put his name on the map forever.

The inherent conflict was, at first, not easily found.  A column like his did garner a great deal of attention, even in the first year he was turning enough of a profit to stop funding the Standard out of his savings.  People liked what he was writing, they savored seeing the elite made to squirm, and he was in the position to throw as many people under the bus as need be in order to be recognized as the man who could do it with impunity.  Unfortunately, this did not – could not – come to be.  In order to keep both the Standard, and his sham of a reputation
and
write his column… Hack had to write under a pseudonym.  It grated on him each and every time he typed the fucking thing. 

His chair's rotation stopped just short of 360º and he had to nurse himself around to his desk with a few small kicks.  The alcohol was readily at hand, whiskey this time, but it did not relieve the anger he kept at every last thing in his life.  It wasn't fair that he'd made it on his own, but couldn't tell a fucking soul.  If he did, the illusion of integrity so carefully crafted, would evaporate before his eyes.  In the space of one 360º arc, Hack had gone from the master of his domain to a surveyor of hades itself. 

He jammed the pencil down into the desk and brought out his cell phone.  Another drink as he swiped to the right speed dial and punched the number.

             
This one was another brown kid with a Punjab accent and some sense of the covert.  Brown kids were easier to get into position.  Mostly his contacts – agents, he liked to think–worked for what they thought was exceptionally good money.  They were young, most had debts, and they were willing to take risks that Hack could easily deny.  They would get their checks for working on the inside and feeding information, and Hack would get his stories.  He had seventy–two of these types at his disposal right now, a large staff to run out of his pocket to be sure, but that's the way he liked it.  Diverse and deniable.

             
He picked up the tenderized pencil and waited as the phone rang.  As was often the case, it rang to a bogus voicemail account at which point Hack punched
end
and put the phone down beside his tenderized pencil.

             
Four minutes later, it rang back.

             
"Let's hear it.  You said you had something."

             
“I do."

             
“Convince me,” he said.  All the kid had provided thus far was a little inside information on an altercation between two police dogs and the beginning salvos of what would ultimately amount to little more than a perceived smear editorial against a couple of cops who had bent the rules.  Such shit almost never made it to print status because, quite frankly, people were programmed by Hollywood to actually
admire
cops who made up their own game plan.  Too many fucking Lethal Weapon movies.  It wasn’t much, and would have to be spun to the point where everyone would just get dizzy.  It would end up in the online column, but, again, it was shit.  Eight weeks of nothing.  It was almost as if the fucking police were running their department on the level.  Of course, his inside guy was new, and new guys were never trusted.  This kid was a bit of idealist despite his ability to stay under the radar, and that was also irritating. 

             
“Do you remember Whitaker Meek?”

             
He turned the pencil under his molars.  “Yeah, political guy.  Got culled from the herd under Carter or Reagan.”  He paused, “Jesus, tell me he was bangin’ some whore or something.”

             
“More than that.”  The voice was clipped; the kid was quiet all of the time, but now he sounded almost sullen.

             
The pencil came out, poised to jot notes, "Go.”

             
“His kid’s in the hospital.”
              “Big deal…”

             
“
His kid’s
whole family got wiped out in Arlington Heights. 
His son
, Seth, is a person of interest in the case.”

             
“Holy shit,” Hack whispered.  He leaned back in his chair, pondering his hairy toes.  “Does anyone know?  Made the connection?”

             
“Probably, but it’s just internal right now."

             
Hack closed his eyes and smiled.  “And it hasn’t come out yet, at all?”

             
“Not yet.  I’m sure someone has it figured, but they’re keeping it real quiet.  Arlington Heights is pretty uppity.”

             
"You think you'll get to look at anything?" Hack asked quickly.

             
"I'll be here all night.  They called me in right away to look at his home computers, financial stuff I guess.  Got some really cool encryption…."

             
Hack cut him off, “I want you to call me every hour with an update no matter what time it is, understand?” 

             
“Yes.”

             
Hack killed the telephone without another word and kicked himself into another gleeful arc.  By the time he reached its zenith, he was angry once again.