The Posture of Innocence, day 4
Some extended content for this continuing story, @freewritehouse, @icedrum, @owasco, @misschance, @fitinfun, @wakeupkitty, @scribblingramma, @mgaft1, @iamsaray, @deemarshall, and @whatisnew -- while Lieutenant Anderson was off having his adventures in the "Damp Conditions" freewrite, Captain Lee did make it to the record room, and here we get a look into how he thinks, and what his plans are for breaking down that stone wall of unsolved cases that are hiding the engine of all the corruption he's been dealing with since Black, White, and RED All Over, born on Steemit in July, now on Amazon!
Here is the prologue, the "Harbor Cruise" freewrite; day 1, day 2, day 3, the "Gut Feeling" freewrite, and Day 3.5, the "Damp Conditions" freewrite. Now we have day 4 -- and day 4.5 will be built out of the "Red Tongue" freewrite ... shortly!
Every day, Captain Lee banged his head against his personal stone wall – those 25-30 cases that had so much missing information of a certain type that Captain Lee knew, based on the officers involved, that corruption played a major role, and that something much, much bigger was going on than even met the eye as he had been preparing all the files about Black people in police incidents for the last ten years, per a Freedom of Information Act demand from the Lofton County Free Voice.
That demand from the Free Voice had precipitated the Gilligan House Burning, as police commissioner Orton Thomas of Big Loft and Captain Braxton Beauregard Bragg of Littleburg had pulled together all officers in the county willing to don white sheets and Molotov cocktails in order to burn up the Gilligan House, where the principals of the Lofton County Free Voice had taken the demanded data and planned to make public examination of it.
Or, so the trap had been conceived by the principals and snapped shut with deadly force, by the Black men committed to the defense of the Lofton County Free Voice, with the official help of Captain Hamilton and Lieutenant O'Reilly of Tinyville and also Captain Lee.
Almost all of Lofton County hoped that would be the end of the matters stirred up … Captain Lee cherished no such hopes, even though Captain Hamilton had dealt with Captain Bragg and Captain Lee had dealt with Commissioner Thomas. The ringleaders would provide no more leadership, and a great number of rogue officers had been culled, but the great evil that had motivated all of them – the engine that had generated all the money that had made racist policing so popular for them – was still running, untouched. Captain Lee could feel it, and smell it, though he could neither see it, touch it, or grip it – yet.
In the absence of the necessary information, Captain Lee kept a concept in his mind he called file zero, in which he mentally filed what should have been in each case. In the Soames case file zero, there should have been a note that Mrs. DeVille's building was too short in 1994 for her to have seen what she claimed – but if someone knew that, then another suspect, and investigation of that suspect, should have been present as well. That person existed. The defense knew it and got it in the legal record – but that investigation had either not been done or had been removed.
With that in mind, Captain Lee updated his file zeroes for the other 25-30 cases – it was no longer a question of those murders not being solved. It was a question of powerful forces in the police department knowing exactly who had done those murders, and being complicit with them.
What made these things particularly explosive – sad enough to say – was that it was one thing if Tom Jones, young Black man, had savagely murdered important White financier John Soames because, you know, that was just how Black folks are. That was fine, so far as Southern thinking went. It disturbed nothing of importance in that thinking. But it was entirely a different thing if John Soames – and two or three dozen others – had been murdered by other powerful White people powerful enough to have the whole police department in Big Loft covering for them.
To exonerate Tom Jones, even after 25 years, would be to start to blow the cover not only on whatever was going on behind the scenes, but also on the innocent posturing of the upper echelons of Lofton County's society. Somebody had to have paid for the murder, and the cover-up. Somebody presently admired and celebrated in the society was not innocent. Somebody was about to get exposed.
This was the kind of thing that could get an honest police officer killed … but, Special Forces colonels were the type of men that at just about the time you realized you needed to get hold of them, they had you – or Death had you. Henry Fitzhugh Lee was certainly one of those types, his new black and gold police uniform having changed nothing.
Captain Lee also knew that certain people working around the record room were watching him, and by extension, his division's lieutenants. Records would get shifted around from time to time as well, apparent to the captain's photographic memory, doubly apparent after he had laid a few false trails and gotten someone to react to them. Therefore, Captain Lee had another space in his head: the “forbidden zone” where all his files zero must have existed. Not that there was a certain place. The files, by volume, had not been removed yet. They were all there, because the sudden absence of hundreds and thousands of reams of paper would be too obvious while “they” knew he was watching out for “them.”
Captain Lee's ultimate plan was not even to find the files any more – that would take too long with the clues he had to work with. His plan was to force whoever it was who did know to yank them out for him.
Captain Lee also considered something else that was becoming apparent … there was a whistleblower somewhere in the department, perhaps more than one. On the Soames case, someone had gotten that defense attorney something of importance – 25 years before anyone important was in the department with any desire to clean it up, someone had taken a big, big chance. An unsung hero, getting truth out to those in a position to listen – if not inside the department, then elsewhere. Captain Lee suspected there were several such people, just because the Lofton County Free Voice also got some key tidbits quite often as well.
Yet, also, Captain Lee's gut feeling was that someone was also reaching out to him … sometimes, and this was also why he went to the record room every day, a record that got shifted was shifted back, and key light came to a case he was working on. It had to be someone fairly high up who could know what was in his reports in terms of what his division was working on and what he might need.
Not that Captain Lee indulged his curiosity on the subject of whistleblowers. Their anonymity was their strength – and their safety. It was enough to know that God always, always had people who would be moved, against all odds, to get truth out to the right people who could do something with it.
As he was in the midst of that very thought, Captain Lee saw something of interest – a little sticky tab where there had not been one. Captain Lee pulled the file and found an article from 1994, in a case file from 2006. In this article, someone had written an article about the perils of institutional investment in planned prison projects in neighboring Roanoke County – although proposed changes in federal and state laws were going to make it easier to fill those prisons up, the temptations to graft and other forms of corruption would make it next to impossible to come out, in the end, with a stable investment because – “it will all come out, and collapse, in the wash.” The author of that well-reasoned article had been found brutally murdered two weeks later. His name? John Soames.
The case file from 2006 was of a cold case Captain Lee's division was working on and expected to crack that week, but it was not one of any importance to those watching the captain. So, he went and copied everything in the file, and then removed the little sticky tab and put it back. No one was the wiser when he walked away with the true motive for John Soames' death in hand, and a new clue that fit with many others – a single motive for the deaths of key people who had opposed some aspect of the funding, building, and filling of Pendleton Prison while it was in its planning stages. All of Captain Lee's theoretical files zero had been filled in a little more.