For NaNoWriMo: The Field of Blood, part 14
Mr. Thomas Hancock is apprehended and spills ALL the beans ... which leads to others getting apprehended and spilling all their beans ... but Morton Data Master gets mean and ornery to Lieutenant O'Reilly at the end! You can get caught up on part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9, part 10, part 11, part 12, and part 13 to catch up on all the twists and turns!
Of course, Captain Hamilton and Captain Lee were not as mean as they could have been, for three good reasons. The first was that they recognized the difference between Special Forces work and police work, which led to the second: the hunted were supposed to be taken alive unless presenting a clear threat to the officer's safety.
The third reason was that of course Mr. Varick had put some reporters from the Lofton County Free Voice on to tail Captain Hamilton to the scene of the capture, and they had matched his Dukes of Hazzard-worthy driving to catch up with Mr. Hancock. They and their cars pulled off the highway at a discreet distance from where Mr. Hancock had gotten run off, but they were watching everything with their long-range cameras, and once Mr. Hancock had been taken into custody, one car tailed Captain Hamilton right back down to Tinyville, and the other tailed Captain Lee back to Big Loft.
“I didn't do it – I ran because I knew everybody was going to try to pin it on me, but I didn't do it!”
“Well, what did you do, then?” Captain Hamilton said, and Lieutenant O'Reilly's mouth fell open as Mr. Hancock spilled all the beans.
By the time, Captain Lee had returned – he and Captain Hamilton had gotten the warrants necessary to search all Mr. Hancock's home and office, and they let Mr. Hancock wait under Lieutenant O'Reilly's competent care while they searched and pulled all the data together. Captain Lee had to put his head on the desk as Captain Hamilton asked that question, the lieutenant's mouth fell open, and Mr. Hancock's mouth started talking and found no place to stop for 20 solid minutes. This just tickled Captain Lee … these civilians just were not prepared …
“See, it all started out eight years ago – Mr. Bolling has a major cocaine habit and has been taking it out of the company, and that would be fine –.”
Just when Captain Lee didn't think Lieutenant O'Reilly's jaw could drop any further – .
“ – Except that he shares the habit with the founder, Mr. Reynolds, and they are just snorting up all the money. I mean, they are out of control! Mr. Bolling was talking last year about how they are importing the stuff straight from their friends in Colombia, and those folks want to be paid pronto – and they left the video up on the corporate Christmas party page!”
In his mind, even though it was beyond the actual range of his hearing, Captain Hamilton just knew that the * Lofton County Free Voice* had a reporter listening at the door who was going to peel off and go find that video. Captain Lee's hearing was slightly more keen. He could hear the footsteps going away from the door and had to put his head back down on the desk until he could control his laughter.
“So, what does the company do to feed the executive habits? Develop properties and get those development fees. Mr. Folsom-Slocum was hired, and he doesn't smoke – his job was to keep the engine running with us project managers, and to get those jobs no matter what.
“I am the best at getting it done – I've been getting projects, getting them planned, and getting obstacles out of the way for 15 years! And what is the thanks I get? I found a bloody noose planted in my apartment, and hear police sirens coming – I know Mr. Reynolds had that done! But I didn't do it! I didn't lynch Mr. Rett! I'm innocent!”
“Oh, you're hardly innocent,” Captain Hamilton said, “and you were fighting with Mr. Rett the night before he was killed over a cool $500,000.”
“I didn't say I didn't want to kill him!” Mr. Hancock said. “N****s are never satisfied!”
Captain Lee stopped laughing on the spot. His grandfather, Horace Fitzhugh Lee, had taught him to hate the word: “If you have to use that word to make yourself feel big and important next to a Negro man, that means he's big and you're really, really small and petty. God made the Negro just like He made the White man – and the last time I looked at the dust of the ground, it looked a whole lot more like the Negro than we do. The Negro is not a thing: he is a man, also bearing the reflection of the image of God. Don't you let me catch you calling any man of any color out of his name, Henry – but especially, not that name.” Grandpa Lee's teaching had prepared his grandson to be able to be accepted by the Morton family, and to marry the love of his life, Vanessa Morton … for surely the Lord had made her, dark as a summer night, kissed with the dew of stars … and from a truly beautiful family.
All that said: Mr. Hancock had just confirmed that he was a small and petty man, who had been getting his comeuppance in every direction … Captain Lee's lips twisted in a contemptuous smile about Mr. Hancock's black eye … .
“Rett has been with us 12 years. He's been working with Wells Fargo for 30 years. Never even cracked $50,000 there, in 30 years. We more than doubled his yearly income in his first job. First job: $100,000. Twelve jobs at least per year – the man was brilliant at infiltrating Black organizations and helping us relieve them of things they could never bring to their full potential anyway. We gave him raises based on how complex the job was – this thing in Tinyville we staged out over two years and paid him a total of $2 million.
“But then he started looking at what the development fees were overall – the d*** n****r started doing percentages. The more knowledge we let these people get, the less useful they are! So what if he was getting half a percent – that was still twice, three times, five times what Wells Fargo could get him, and a far sight more than he could have ever lifted from the treasuries of the little n****r groups we had him working in! On the Tinyville job we gave him a whole 2 percent – 2 percent, mind you – of the total development fee!
“But here he comes talking about a bonus – since I was getting a bonus, he needed to get a bonus at least half as big as mine because he did all the necessary work. Like his penciling footnotes on the arguments coming from our opponents counted for as much as the work I have to do to keep these things going! Like people are just writing me checks before deals close! Like he gets to measure what he gets by what I get! This is Virginia – the n****r should have been hung for just the thought! But he had the nerve to walk up on my in the alley behind my building!”
“If I had been armed, he would have been dead – I would have emptied every bullet into him for just easing up on me. I would have reloaded for his d****d demands! I would have certainly cut off his **** and burned his body for daring to threaten me! Like he would have survived two minutes after revealing Topia's schemes – like the real defenders of White rights couldn't get to him! We've got enough police officers and prison guards to make sure it was done – like he was the only one we've ever paid. These n*****s, constantly forgetting their place as if they could survive if we could just get serious about putting them back in their place!”
Captain Lee put his head back down on the desk, this time so he could laugh until he cried … some White folks apparently still didn't know about 1865 or 1965, and that all attempts to put Black people back in their place wholesale had been failing for quite some time in Virginia … .
“Which is every reason you had to kill him,” Captain Hamilton said.
“I didn't get the chance!” Mr. Hancock said. “If only I had my pistol – but he sucker-punched me after I started putting him back in his place, and I had to get my jaw realigned after that!”
“But you checked out of the hospital that night,” Captain Hamilton said. “Where were you at 3:30pm on Saturday?”
“Networking at the Lofton County Harvest Festival – 200 people have my cards!” Mr. Hancock said.
“But nobody can confirm you were there from 3:00-4:00, can they?” Captain Hamilton said.
That stopped Mr. Hancock short.
“You don't have an alibi, Mr. Hancock,” Captain Hamilton said, “and you certainly wanted the man dead.”
“I already told you how I would have done it,” Mr. Hancock hissed. “If I were to do a lynching of a n****r like that, it would have been fully done, and you would have read about and so would all the rest of the n*****s and get the fear of the White man back in them like they ought to have it. S***: I could have even paid to have that done if I had wanted it. I've certainly paid enough people to do what I wanted! But he died too easy! I didn't do it!”
“So how did the bloody noose get into your apartment?”
“I told you – Mr. Reynolds and the rest! They just want to keep the cocaine coming, and with Mr. Folsom-Slocum out, they are running wild! Check the record – Rett is the chocolate cream of the crop that we employ, but most of the rest are just common lock-pickers who take stuff out and put stuff in.”
Captain Hamilton made a note: it was time to pick up Joe Dillard.
“What record?” he asked as he passed the note generally in Captain Lee's direction.
Captain Lee reached out, took the note, read it, and went out, passing Lieutenant O'Reilly with word that he would return.
Mr. Hancock laid out the entire Topia scheme for the last 12 years – all the bribery, all the corruption, all the side crimes big and small carried out to keep the cocaine coming and those who kept it coming paid enough to keep it going. He was not going down by myself, and did not realize how much he sounded like Mr. Rett in their last conversation: “These people have no loyalty, but I will bring them down with me!” He gave Captain Hamilton the key to his apartment, and Captain Hamilton and Lieutenant O'Reilly picked up all the documentary evidence he had pointed to – Mr. Hancock had kept copies for just such an emergency.
“Wow,” Lieutenant O'Reilly said as they were carrying it all out. “No honor among thieves no matter what strata of society they are on.”
“It all checks out,” Captain Hamilton said. “Everything he said – the evidence is right here.”
And that, of course, would allow the Lofton County Free Voice all the cover they needed to print the whole scheme, and say the evidence was in the hands of the police.
A different angry news man was waiting outside police headquarters, pacing angrily, when the captain and lieutenant returned.
“How are you giving all this exclusive access to information to the Free Voice, and you haven't even called me?” George Kraft from the Tinyville Times shrieked upon seeing the two officers.
“First of all,” Captain Hamilton said, “you were supposed to call me when you wanted an interview. Second of all, I don't have to follow the Free Voice – they are following me around and sticking like glue.”
“How can you just allow that to happen?”
“There is this thing called freedom of the press, and that's in this thing called the Constitution. I know we sort of live under it only when we want to in Virginia, but it is the law of the land even in Virginia. But you didn't let me finish … I said that they were sticking to me, meaning your behavior is going on the record tomorrow.”
Mr. Kraft looked around, and there was Malik Thompson, standing at the corner with his notebook and smiling.
Mr. Kraft turned red, and then went back to his car, unlocked his car, got in, locked the door, put his head in his hands, and then started a long series of vehement but muffled noises that probably wouldn't have been printable anyway had they been understandable.
“Mr. Thompson is going to have fun describing that,” Lieutenant O'Reilly murmured to Captain Hamilton as they went inside the police station.
“Yes, but, our department is going to pay for that tomorrow,” Captain Hamilton said. “Mr. Kraft is going to try to destroy us with his pen if he doesn't get his way.”
“Well, how is going to get his news if he doesn't put the work in?”
“To Mr. Kraft, the White press is the fourth estate and the most important one. He considers that those who get coverage from him and his paper have been especially privileged, and ought to seek the honor in the midst of all the pressing news that Tinyville has.”
Lieutenant O'Reilly almost tripped and fell, laughing.
“Delusions of grandeur can be so hard on those that have them,” Captain Hamilton said as his lieutenant fell into his desk chair, laughing, “so get it all out of your system, because the poor sufferer may yet storm in here.”
Sure enough: Mr. Kraft came storming in five minutes later.
“You mean to tell me you haven't closed the case on this suicide yet?”
“Actually, we just have picked up a suspect with motive, opportunity, and strongly expressed desire to murder Mr. Rett. We have him in custody and we have another pick-up on a person of interest going on now.”
“What?”
“Yes, Mr. Kraft, we are hard at work. So: you can either calm down, sit down, and ask some proper questions, or read it all tomorrow morning in the Free Voice, which sticks to me like glue but does not disrupt my investigation. They know freedom of the press does not extend far enough to allow them that – do you?”
Mr. Kraft was speechless and red faced again.
“So, you either get out, or decide what you want to do and figure out some proper questions in accord with semi-rigorous public journalism in five, four, three, two –.”
Mr. Kraft sat down and pulled out his notebook. His eyes blazed with deadly intent, and Captain Hamilton knew the furious reporter was likely to twist his words – but, Malik Thompson had appeared at the open door and was listening too, and Mr. Kraft turned around and realized it. So, he conducted a brief, chilly interview with Captain Hamilton and went to get the evening news in place, 12 hours before the Free Voice would print the latest updates. Or, so he thought. Captain Hamilton was very like his gentleman general ancestor: not easily offended, but if you crossed the line with him, he would hem you up in ways his quiet manner left you unprepared for.
Meanwhile, it came in handy that Captain Lee was a stickler for detail – he had gone on vacation from the Big Loft police, but had left himself on call for county needs. Thus, Captain Hamilton had simply been able to call him up as an assisting county officer, so, in that authority, he came to Joe Dillard's place of work to pick him up for questioning after work.
Joe Dillard had not realized that he had been observed breaking into Mr. Rett's apartment and delivering the paperwork he had stolen there to Mr. Folsom-Slocum. His whole thought was about another robbery – one that would have made the money difference to break him out of dead-end security jobs and bouncing, but also big enough to put back in jail for a long time. So, he did an even dumber thing than running from Captain Lee. He squared up to fight him.
“I can't do it – I'm not going back to prison,” he said, and then picked up a shovel put down at a construction site. “I'm not going back!”
Captain Lee did not even bother to pull out his gun.
“You're right. If you swing it, you're dead. If you put it down, I'm only here to take you in for questioning about a petty theft. Put it down.”
Mr. Dillard tensed up to swing, but stopped again as he saw the look in Captain Lee's face
“Put it down, Mr. Dillard,” the captain ordered. “Now.”
What were the chances? Mr. Dillard sized Captain Lee up – he was a few inches shorter, and at least ten years older – but he was in good shape, and looked like some of Mr. Dillard's military uncles. The gun wasn't visible and the hands were not near where that gun should be … but that was scary by itself, to think that the man knew he could kill you and you couldn't see how … .
Mr. Dillard put the shovel down and raised his hands. The police officer seemed calm and even relieved once the shovel was down. Maybe it would work out if Mr. Dillard cooperated.
Once in Tinyville, Joe Dillard sang like a canary. Yes, he had taken the papers out of Mr. Rett's apartment on Mr. Folsom-Slocum's orders and delivered them to Mr. Folsom-Slocum, and yes, on Mr. Reynolds orders he had put the bloody – or at least barbecue-sauce stained – noose in Mr. Hancock's apartment.
“They said they needed to flush a White man out, and a noose would work as well in a case like this as it would on a n****r, because the n****r newspaper would hang him. I wasn't supposed to hear that part, but Mr. Reynolds was talking to somebody as I walked up.”
And so it was by the following morning that the founder and all of the top executives of Topia Development Group and their known lackeys were all in jail, and the Tinyville Times, Big Loft Bulletin, and especially the Lofton County Free Voice were laying out all the reasons. This gave the Tinyville City Council all that they needed to void the contract with Topia to develop the field where the 1967 massacre had taken place. The way was left open for other plans; the idea of a recreation area died with Topia.
There was, however, one tiny problem, a problem Morton Data Master spat back at Lieutenant O'Reilly with all the unsparing viciousness of a machine that knew nothing about feelings to be spared.
“I told you,” Captain Hamilton said.
“But how can Mr. Hancock not be the killer – what do you mean we are going to have to release him today?”
“Check the photographs and descriptions of the scene, the body, and the suspect in question in the data sets again, Lieutenant, before Morton Data Master decides to direct an electrical bolt in your direction.”
“It can do that?”
“Captain Lee's in-laws created it – how different except in color do you think they are from him?”
Captain Hamilton was kidding, but maybe not … with the idea of a program with something of Captain Lee's personality in mind setting there, glowering in red lines from the monitor, Lieutenant O'Reilly did as he was told.
“I still don't get it, sir,” he said after an hour.
“Let me break this down for you – you look at the photographs of the tree in question and how damaged it is. Somebody had to climb it, hauling Mr. Rett – assuming him to be heavily drugged because there is no sign of a blow or other violence in the coroner's report – behind him, tie on the noose, and push Mr. Rett off. There was no way to do all that from the ground, and there was no evidence of a chair to sit him on. But leave even the possibility of that, and Mr. Hancock has to haul Mr. Rett around.”
“Okay,” Lieutenant O'Reilly said.
“Look at Mr. Hancock's description – he talks big and has a ton of energy, but –.”
Mr. Thomas Hancock was exactly five feet two, 120 pounds “soaking wet,” Lieutenant O'Reilly said as he put his head in his hands.
Captain Hamilton waited a few seconds … .
“Zap!”
The lieutenant jumped almost a foot in the air, imagining that bolt coming from Morton Data Master, and came down laughing at himself.
“We can't have Captain Lee around here any more,” he said. “He's a bad influence on you, sir. What must it have been like for the enemy to have to deal with the two of you at the same time?”
“I'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.”
That wasn't actually a joke, although Lieutenant O'Reilly laughed, having no way of knowing.
“We treat our lieutenants alike – stay alert, Lieutenant, and don't let your emotions about wicked little men influence your understanding of the case. A play-zap won't sting half as badly as the consequences of letting said men blow you all the way off course.”