Young Writers Society

In San Francisco, a taskforce has been created to find a former cop turned fugitive but they stumbled upon the vast criminal history of another cop, Russel Pierce. He disappeared before they could arrest him, however.

To know more, read Chapter 17.3.

Flores was feeling slow, tired and was in a good deal of pain. He had a badly bruised leg, two cracked ribs, a broken nose and two black eyes. The doctor who had treated his injuries had taken pity and given him a small bottle of codeine, but Flores had been using for far too long and not even twice the normal dose of the good stuff could provide relief.

His picture hadn’t been released to the press yet. He had spent the night holed up in another cheap motel before going out to buy a burner and making calls to all his CIs. He hoped he didn’t sound as desperate as he was. He needed to find Pierce. Unfortunately, he wasn’t that good a cop. By mid-afternoon, he still didn’t have a lead.

That’s when Manu sent him a text message. Manu was one of his most useful CIs – a big black man, who rarely spoke. When he did speak, it was hard to make out words past his thick French accent and his slippery grasp of English grammar. A bouncer and occasional DJ in a trendy club downtown, he made his real money dealing smalltime drugs to the patrons.

Flores didn’t touch the low-quality stuff Manu sold. He didn’t want to snort rat poison. But the bouncer was an easy squeeze for information – one hint that you might search him, and he was ready to turn on his mother.

His text was barely legible. After much frowning at it, Flores decided he could decipher an address and something about a rumor regarding Russ. Without surprise, he wound up in front of a squat near Civic Center Plaza. It was an older-looking, one-block building. Many windows looked out onto the street but there were lots of broken panes, a bit of everything covering the breaks – tarp, bits of cardboard, etc. The lower floors had been entirely boarded shut.

The detective sent a quick text to Manu asking him where he was.

“Inside,” the Martinican replied. “2nd floor.”

Sighing, Flores walked around the building. It wasn’t even 5 pm and, already, crackheads were using out there in the open where everyone could see them. It just had to make you wonder what kind of shit was so bad that it could only happen out of sight inside the abandoned building. But he didn’t wonder too hard.

Addict. He hated that word. It made him feel like such a fuckup, like an ill-fitting piece of clothing. He wasn’t like those poor bastards rolling on the ground and pissing themselves – did that mean he couldn’t call himself an addict? If not for the codeine, he would have been getting shaky, feeling the first effects of withdrawal. Had to be addiction, right?

A couple of graffitied boards had been torn from the back of the building, opening a crack just wide enough to slip inside.

Flores took off his sunglasses. He wouldn’t need them inside – all the better if his battered face made him look like trouble. He kept his back to the wall, his hand resting lightly on his service weapon as his eyes got used to the darkness. It wasn’t entirely impenetrable, gray light fell through the greasy windows upstairs and somehow found its way down there.

He only groped around a little as he made his way upstairs. Mattresses and ragged blankets had been laid in every corner. It wasn’t easy to tell the bodies lying on them apart from the rest of the garbage. The stink was terrible, nausea-inducing – piss, feces, the smell of rapidly heating crack cocaine.

Flores stepped onto the second floor, looked around. “Manu?!” he called.

No answer. He got his phone out, typed, “where R U?”

No answer but he heard a distinct ping! that had to be Manu’s phone receiving his message. It seemed to come from the end of the hallway.

Flores drew his weapon. He wasn’t the smartest cop ever to walk his beat, but he was no moron and self-preservation had always been his specialty. Most of his worries centered around the last room, but he conducted a cursory check of the other room. Lots of locked doors. Behind the others, he saw more of the same – druggies sleeping it off, druggies smoking it off. A crackie sat cross-legged on the floor digging into a bag of M&Ms. She looked barely fifteen, but her lips were burnt from pressing against an overheated pipe.

“Dulce Dios,” Flores whispered under his breath.

The kid’s empty eyes followed him as he moved past her door. He had rarely been this grateful he hadn’t brought a child into this world. It was bad enough that he had dragged Trish into this mess with him.

He stopped before he reached the last door. It stood half open. He pulled the burner out again and pressed call. Music rose from the end of the hallway,

“Call me say rudeboy

In a dance hall reggae music I”

Manu.

Flores dropped the cell back in his pocket, letting it ring. Both hands on his gun, he approached the door.

“I give you big boy contest now

So would you tell me now”

It opened on an empty apartment. The dilapidated entrance was small, square with no window and just one pile of rags in a corner. There were three doors. Two were closed, one gaped open, letting out the rest of Manu’s ringtone,

“Ne cherche pas à test même si ton gun est rangé

Tu ne sais jamais ce qu’il peut t’arriver

Car babylone te rend mauvais

Car babylone te rend mauvais

Engrainé dans le vice tu commences à manquer de respect”

Flores progressed along the wall, resorting to training in the face of uncertainty. He tested the handle of the first closed door. It was locked. He crept closer to the next one. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see through the open door. A tall silhouette was slumped in a broken armchair.

“Manu?”

No answer, just Manu’s phone, ringing,

“Tu passes tes journées dans un décor de béton armé

Un quotidien synonyme de morosité

Droit chemin ou réalité tu crois être bon mais t’es mauvais”

The second door was locked too. Lowering his gun slightly, Flores entered the last room. It looked like a bedroom – on the small side, with dark red paper that peeled off the wall and only the one door. The only piece of furniture was the armchair where Manu sat. His chin rested on his chest, his skin was an unhealthy shade of grey.

Swearing under his breath, Flores lowered his gun to check the young man’s pulse. Dead. Dead and cold. A cellphone sat in his lap like it had been thrown there.

Flores heard nothing, saw nothing, had no warning before a sharp pain pierced his spine. He opened his mouth to scream and something ripped across his throat, so sharp it burned. As he fell to the ground, he realized three things.

First, he should have checked the closet before he gave it his back. Second, Manu wouldn’t have written “2nd”. He would have written “2th” because Manu’s English just wasn’t that good yet. Third, he was dead, and Trish was probably better off for it.

***

Russ stood over the still-warm body, breathing hard. Men weren’t really his thing, but a kill was a kill. He wished he had time to watch the blood drain out of Flores. He knelt by the man, rolled him on his back, picked up the gun the other disgraced detective had dropped and gathered the backup piece at his ankle and the badge in his pocket.

“Thanks, Robbie,” he whispered. “It should come in handy.”

He left.

***

Detective Reims walked in the room he shared with Rotwell, Mavrici and Jenks. Mavrici was out. She hadn’t so much as set foot in the station since they had found Tracy Sarasian’s body. He knew she had some bitterness to work through. He understood. Someone higher up the hierarchy had decided to look away at the time of Carlsen’s arrest, allowing the whole mess to fester. He felt that they all shared in some of the blame.

The news he bore wouldn’t improve her opinion of the SFPD.

“Guys, we’ve got another body. Marcella Beck, 29.” He rattled off the address. “Looks like she was killed sometime the day before yesterday. Coming?”

Jenks and Rotwell leapt to their feet. They all strode down the hallway in a tight formation headed for the nearby parking.

Rotwell wanted to know, “Are we sure it was Pierce?”

“Oh, yeah,” Reims replied, stroking a hand down his face. “Same MO. It was Sarasian all over again. Seems like he did about the same thing – he raped her, beat her to death in the bed, then he moved her to the sofa and spent the night. No forensic precaution. There were dozens of raunchy texts to and from Pierce on Beck’s phone. Plus, you can clearly see him on the building’s video surveillance. He did it. There’s no question.”

“He’s on a spree.”

“Yeah.”

Reims felt like he was living out his worst nightmare. How could the situation have spiraled that way? He had always had little respect with Pierce. The other detective had produced good results and gotten along with everyone, but he had always been just a little off. Still, he had never suspected that the guy was a complete psycho.

Reims rolled his shoulders, trying to ease the tension in them. Had he been that willfully blind? It was so much easier not to look too hard at a colleague.

He had forced himself to read through the entirety of Malik’s diary. The pictures and the tales of abuse haunted Levowsky, the girl’s immediate superior. Reims had been shaken too. He had crossed paths with Malik on so many crime-scenes over the years. He had often made a distracted note of how tired and unhappy she looked, but he hadn’t broken his rules and bridged the distance he kept from his colleagues.

He regretted that, he regretted his unwillingness to scratch beyond the Pierce’s slick surface. Malik, who wasn’t even a cop, had unearthed a real mine of crimes and shady dealings. No tangible proof, true, but enough for IAD to get Pierce suspended.

“Are you okay?” Jenks asked even as he was unlocking his car.

They had decided to take two cars to the crime-scene and Rotwell was already maneuvering out of the parking lot.

“I’m fine.”

Jenks snorted, started the car and drove them out of the lot before Reims could bring himself to tell him, “I asked the Captain to be pulled off the task-force.” He shrugged. “It’s only a matter of time before your superiors insist that the SFPD get kicked out, anyway.”

Jenks didn’t contradict him on that. Just like Reims, he had no doubt taken a note of the astonishing number of federal offenses Malik had recorded in her diary. The biggest surprise was that the Feds hadn’t wrestled the case out of the SFPD’s hands yet. Reims had no idea what kind of deal the higher-ups had negotiated so he would stay on the case, but he knew why they were pushing so hard.

“She said no,” Jenks surmised.

“Of course, she said no. I’m the token hire. They’ll keep me here as long as they can, if only so they can save face.”

The two men fell quiet. No wasn’t the only thing Cordello had told him. She had reminded him that he wasn’t responsible for Pierce’s actions. She had also made it clear – repeatedly – that his next actions would determine how the SFPD would be perceived for years to come. This was his responsibility. And she had been quite clear on what his role was to be.

“Keep the Feds happy,” she had told him, “but make it clear that Pierce’s an SFPD problem for now.”

Cordello wanted the collar.

Jenks swore softly as he turned into Beck’s street. There were uniforms everywhere. Reims flashed them all his badge a dozen times on the way to the crime scene. They had to sign three different logs. People were bustling all around the apartment. It was almost obscene. The body was still laid out naked on the sofa, in the middle of this circus.

Rotwell seemed to think along the same lines. He stopped an officer to ask him, “Where is the ME?”

“Already came and went but the van wouldn’t start. Backup is downtown. Two multiples,” the man answered. “It’s on its way.”

Reims called upon his years of experience and put on his gloves, looking around as he did. All the books and keepsakes had been thrown in a heap under the empty shelves. “It looks like he searched the place. Anything missing?”

A detective he didn’t know thumbed through his notepad to answer, “The victim’s credit cards. And there’s no cash anywhere in the place.”

Ignoring the faint disgust in the man’s eyes, Reims asked, “He robbed her?”

“Yeah. Seems like he slept in her bed. Your guy also took a shower and cooked himself dinner in the kitchen. Sauté shrimp with Parmesan. The bastard even watched TV. Looks like the body didn’t bother him. The TV was still turned on when we came in. Sports channel. We turned it off. It was getting on everyone’s nerves.”

“Still a cool customer,” Jenks grunted.

“He took her car too,” the detective told him.

The FBI agent perked up. “What kind of car?”

“A European. Volkswagen, I think. A new model.”

“I need the license plate,” Jenks told Reims. “With any luck, it has an anti-theft GPS system.”

The detective almost nodded to his partner’s request. He changed his mind at the last minute. Wherever Russel Pierce was going, they would probably find Peter Carlsen. So, of course, the FBI had good reasons to track down Miss Beck’s car. Unfortunately, Cordello wouldn’t want the SFPD to make those arrests. They had gotten so much bad press in the last couple of weeks that she would want people from her station to bring in the disgraced cops themselves.

“Don’t bother,” he said, though he hated to play politics. “The SFPD will check that out.”

“Our techs are better.”

Reims was startled. It wasn’t quite true. He had worked a few cases with Nyssa Malik and she had been what the kids called a wizard.

“Thanks,” he replied slowly, “but we can manage, and we’ve got no proof yet that this car’s connected to the Carlsen investigation. Cordello wants everything related to Pierce to be dealt with in house.”

Jenks’s expression said it all. He had been expecting that moment. He knew it was nothing personal. They had played partners for a while but, at heart, they were no less on opposite sides of an age-old rivalry – Feds vs local LEOs.

Reims hated to let that get in the way of real police work. “I’m sorry. If it was up to me…”

But Jenks smiled tiredly, raising a hand. “I get it, Denis.”

The detective nodded in thanks. He didn’t know the agent well enough to feel genuine affection for him, but they had some real respect between them.

“We’re leaving for now,” Jenks said. “Our superiors will be in touch with yours. In exchange, please, keep us apprised if your captain lets you.”

“Count on me.”

Jenks gestured to Rotwell, who was having a look around the crime-scene. “Let’s go, it’s an SFPD scene.”

“Eh, Reims?!” the marshal called out, loud enough that several heads turned his way. Jenks grabbed him by the shoulder and dragged him toward the door. “Tell your captain to enjoy her free rein while she can. We’ll be getting the case back from you schmucks anytime now, anyway.”

Discordant voices started rising. Ignoring them, Jenks pulled Rotwell out of the room. “Come on, Rotwell. It’s not on him. Let’s go.”

To know what Russ is up to, read Chapter 18.2.