For NaNoWriMo: The Field of Blood, part 4

This portion was written on Nov. 5.

You can get caught up on part 1, part 2, and part 3 -- Captain Hamilton and Lieutenant O'Reilly have completed their investigation of the scene and surroundings of a gruesome death by hanging of a local Black man in Tinyville, VA -- but the sheer manner of Mr. Rett's death, given the sweep of Tinyville's history, has aroused mistrust and seething passions on all sides of the color line. Yet, with that, the hardest thing for Captain Hamilton is just holding his composure in the face of the grief and loss of those who loved the victim ...

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Lieutenant O'Reilly got a reprieve on his studies; he had to get on the road to take all the samples to the lab, and it was imperative that he get going before the morning traffic kicked in at its fullest. He would have to do his research later on.

There was that other way to learn that he would also miss that day, that way to gauge the sense of human tragedy when death under the shadow of old injustice came to a community that had suffered more than its fair share of injustice in the previous 400 years. That way was to be immersed in the sheer anguish of it all, which Captain Hamilton had to endure as the town's chief lawman.

A little after he had graduated from West Point, then-Lieutenant Hamilton had been told by an older rich man: “Hamilton, you have all kinds of talent and skill, but you are not going to get anywhere with that bleeding heart you have toward people who are beneath you.”

Then-Lieutenant Hamilton had smiled genially as he had ended the conversation forever: “Well, first, sir, we need to first consider if where you are speaking from is anywhere that I would ever want to go.”

Then-Lieutenant Hamilton had already settled it in his mind: he was never going to be rich if the price was to grow callous to the needs and suffering of others. Even through Special Forces, even through the deadly missions he had to undertake there, he was known as being exceptionally humane, killing efficiently when necessary but only when necessary – he thought always of the families, and the hurt, of others.

The cost, however, was all the emotion one had to feel and then suppress in order to not sear off one's soul and conscience in a brutal world. The death of Mr. Rett posed another such occasion to pay that cost, all while looking for connections on social media, phone numbers, addresses, all the information that made up the loss and the void. Then there was fielding the emotions of the family and friends as they heard the awful truth … or, meeting the loved ones had heard it through the grapevine and came to the office just after 9:00am, demanding to know why they hadn't been called and a thousand other questions that, given that it had not yet even been eighteen hours since the body had been found, could not be answered satisfactorily.

One had to add on the weight of history as well, of understanding why loved ones, some of whom were old enough to have had family members lynched, ascribed the absence of satisfactory answers to racism because of the callous disregard of those who had sat in that seat before Captain Hamilton came. For some, the trauma of Mr. Rett's loss triggered memories of and emotions from other losses, and it was difficult for the career military man with severe PTSD of his own to process the reactions of others acting out because of the PTSD they had from just living and trying to be free in the United States of America. One had to retain one's composure without seeming cold and indifferent, and it was difficult not to be overcome on one side or another.

The investigator also had to remain clear-minded and observant … certain patterns of shock and grief were of course to be expected, as were certain outliers. Not everyone was sad that Mr. Rett was dead. Some were quite happy about it, and happy to share why they were glad. However, these were not of great interest to Captain Hamilton, because if Mr. Rett's death had been a murder, it had been a crime of great precision, not of passion. So, unless the people spilling their vitriol about Mr. Rett were extraordinary actors and actresses, the emotion they were expressing about Mr. Rett to the lawman investigating his death suggested that they would not have been able to control themselves sufficiently, at the very thought of Mr. Rett, to carry out the precision seen in how the man had met his death.

More interesting to Captain Hamilton were those who were as neutral as he was in emotional expression. That is, they took the news with a measure of surprise and properly stated regret, but they were as together and professional as he was about the whole thing. That required an agenda of some kind regarding Mr. Rett's death, an agenda greater than personal feeling.

Captain Hamilton did not know Mr. Rett, of course, but had been moved greatly by the grief of those who grieved. Yet his agenda of investigating the matter effectively in the midst of the racially charged atmosphere of Lofton County required him to contain his emotions. Any step, to say nothing of a misstep, would have ramifications far beyond the case. Yet Captain Hamilton had no connection to the man. For those who had those connections to Mr. Rett to be as cool as Captain Hamilton, those people must also have had an agenda attached – either before, because they had always considered Mr. Rett merely an associate who could always be replaced, or after because of unknown ramifications. The people with such agendas and let those agendas govern their behavior were also the sort of people who had the control necessary for so precise a murder as Mr. Rett's would be, if it were a murder.

Mapping was a large part of Captain Hamilton's management of data, even if he was tabulating by hand. As he talked with different people, he drew a tree showing what the emotional reactions were and who had them. Afterward, when he had called all those who he could reach, he took note of where people were in it, and found that all the emotionally neutral people were in the Lofton County Black Historical Preservation Society.

By this time, it was around 10:00am – Captain Hamilton had to turn his attention to tagging the photos from the morning that had been uploading to Morton Data Master, and also logging data from and then filing his notes and Lieutenant O'Reilly's notes. After that he dealt with sorting data from the tip line. A bunch of that was interesting …

After all that, Captain Hamilton made one more set of data: a profile of Mr. Rett, so far as the data he had available to him filled it out. Overall, Mr. Rett was an average middle-middle-class American man, materialistic and living above his means to compensate for the difference between his needs and his wants. In many ways, Mr. Rett's profile reminded Captain Hamilton of most of the men he knew who were his age but not building a business – income not moving up as fast as wants and needs, stretching the gap with credit. There was a difference in that Mr. Rett was a relatively young widower, and also put in a lot of his free time with the Lofton County Black Historical Preservation Society, in which he was very active.

Captain Hamilton notated where he had gotten the information in the profile and then prepared to turn the research around the sources to Lieutenant O'Reilly, who would be back shortly – the captain himself had to prepare for the inevitable second set of encounters of the day: the Tinyville Times and Lofton County Free Voice were both in route.

Captain Hamilton's mind, when considering his own family history through the common and uncommon families of Virginia, still retained his family-oriented bent in such considerations. So, he tried to think about what the Civil War had looked like to people like Mrs. Judith Henry and the Widow Tapp – both of whom were at home when the battlefield had expanded and swallowed their homes. Conceptually, that could happen to anyone – including Captain Hamilton's own office, when representatives from the Tinyville Times and the Lofton County Free Voice came at the same time. The two papers despised each other, but the Tinyville Times turned out to be no match for the Free Voice, which answered every attack from the larger paper by digging up “fake news” the paper had run and publicly proving it wrong. The Free Voice reporters also had tipsters who dropped information to them regularly … including a blurry but distinguishable video of the editor-in-chief of the Tinyville Times drunkenly musing that “if only we knew where the n****rs had their little printing house and who exactly was involved – shut 'em up by fire.” This had come out the same week that Captain Bragg of Littleburg and Commissioner Thomas of Big Loft had been inspired to set a trap for the principal men of the Free Voice and burn them and the information they had out at the Gilligan House.

The challenge was that the editor-in-chief was also the owner, and he was not going to fire himself. So, the paper had been tagged and tagged hard by the Free Voice: “It is an organ for the inspiration and encouragement of terrorism against Black people, and has the same number of redeeming features as any other Confederate-style organ of defeated rebellion and traitorous action. Emphasis on the word DEFEATED, once, and again.” Needless to say, the Tinyville Times had not liked that.

Of course there had been a hanging of a Black man, a supercharged issue – the Free Voice and Tinyville Times had both covered the incident as breaking news. Although Captain Hamilton had not had time to review their coverage of the issue by 11:00am, he instantly knew of the disparity in opinions by the raw, sizzling anger the reporters – George Kraft for the Tinyville Times and Malik Thompson for the Free Voice had upon the very sight of the other as they came toward the police station from different corners of the street.

Captain Hamilton shook his head and called out to the two glowering men.

“I have an investigation going on,” he said. “If you want your interview with me today, you had better come in and get it now – and tell your editors the next time they want to run somebody into this office, they need to do better than just announcing at 10:45 that y'all would be here by 11.”

Part 5 is up