Authors: Kevin L Murdock
Stacy began unraveling her web of sheets, revealing her in one of my large college football sweatshirts. “Should we call the cops?”
“Think, hun,” I rashly and smartly retorted.
“Oh yeah. Well, what do you think?”
She often did this when confronted with a problem that didn’t have an apparent solution. Dump it on me. “Not sure what we can do. I’m sure as hell not going to go walking out there now to try and find some cops a mile away. You go back to bed. I’m going to dig up the baseball bat from the basement and make sure everything is locked and closed up downstairs. I’ll probably sleep on the couch with Murph. Okay?”
“Okay, babe. Please wake me if anything happens or you need me to do anything.”
“Will do.” I wasn’t tired anymore, and the adrenaline was definitely starting to pump. Gunshots were not a common occurrence around here. What if Adam had been right? Should we get out of here like him?
No, we have food, and it would be too hard to go with the kids
, I thought reassuringly to myself. Our place was here. Murphy ran down the stairs, expecting a trip outside only to be disappointed. I tiptoed silently so as not to wake the kids. My night watch duties had begun.
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Dawn came early, though it was at least an hour past when I awoke. Amazingly the whole family had slept in. Without noise in the house and no alarms for work, it was our biological alarm clock known as Murphy that licked me in the face and started my day. It almost seemed like a flashback of the previous morning, although this time I was comfortably on the couch and using Paul’s stuffed dinosaurs as a pillow. It was hard to wake suddenly as I’d only dozed for a couple of hours. Pushing the dog away with my left hand while covering my eyes with my right hand, I knocked over the bat. It all came back to me then.
Sitting up and blinking my eyes a few times, I started to regain my senses while looking down at my feet. The old baseball bat was there. It was a wooden bat from my little league days. It still sported a dark patch above the gripping area where I used to put pine resin on it to emulate the big league players, although the stickiness was long gone. It had more strikeouts than hits, but it had delivered a couple of home runs and was stouter than the cheap Chinese bats found on the market these days. Somehow it had survived in a tub all these years with me and was there when I needed it last night. Although not even faintly evening the odds against a gun, it at least gave me some confidence to hold a bat and have a tool to use if the worst case scenario happened. Luckily, last night, all was quiet in the Myers house, except for that one period in the dead of night when the outside echoes of one woman’s struggles invaded our sanctum.
Murphy and I went to the basement, then I stepped outside in the back to breathe some morning air while he took care of his needs. Within seconds, the smell was overpowering. Murphy held his head high and sniffed repeatedly while whimpering. He knew it too. Human evolution has progressed, so our brains have gotten ever sharper while our sense of smell is famous for being the weakest of almost any mammal. Despite having a disadvantage at smelling predators and whatnot, our noses are finely tuned for a few very distinct smells. Nobody will ever confuse smelling a neighbor’s barbecue and the instant hunger it generates when the meat is cooking on a grill as it emanates throughout the air. Fire is also a distinct odor, and it has subtleties that we can detect. A fireplace fire has a nice aromatic quality to it that imbues no natural danger to the brain.
What was in the air now was definitely fire, but it was much more. I’d smelt this before and remembered it. As a child, my friends and I used a large magnifying glass to burn little green plastic toy soldiers as well as beetles. The compact but stout black smoke given off as the green men melted away was more repugnant than confronting and losing to a skunk. It was this plastic burn smell that was now in the air. Something had burned or was burning, and it was more than just some fireplace. It was daytime, and it’s natural to feel safe with daylight. If there was fire close by, I had to find out for the safety of the family. Murphy and I went back upstairs and I got dressed rapidly. Kissing Stacy and briefly mentioning I was taking Murph for a walk, we set out and for once, literally followed our noses.
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I have to admit, I experienced a little rush. Monday mornings were usually spent giving my bank team the rah-rah speeches to go sell some loans or checking accounts. Even though there was some danger and mystery, this was much more fun. The smell was pretty strong, but there wasn’t much smoke in the air. Perhaps it was just someone burning their trash because the garbage truck wouldn’t be making the rounds today. Murph and I exited Blennington Estates to Plantation Road, and after a short walk up the hill heading east, we saw the source of the fire.
There was a small isolated colonial off the busy road that I drove by almost every day and never paid any attention to because I was usually accelerating to try to beat the next light. Today, it had my full attention. Fire is a weird thing in what it chooses to consume and what it spares. The front and center of the house was charred away into a smoldering ash heap, but the two wings flanking the shouldering middle appeared almost untouched. The fire had largely burnt itself out despite traces of smoke that continued to rise up and out into the morning air. Although not a single car was in danger of barreling down on us, we still continued past the house until we reached the next intersection. Looking both ways, we obeyed the pedestrian laws as we stayed in the cross walk section. For some of us, laws and rules were deeply imbedded in the psyche. For others, they were just constraints on the dark desires that were always fermenting right under the surface.
A couple of other people I didn’t know were also rubbernecking around the site. One older Chinese couple was shouting something in Chinese at each other as she kept pointing to a spot around the side door. Her husband was trying to hug her and comfort her, but the same screams persisted. I couldn’t understand the words, but I knew the emotion well. It was obvious that something worse than a fire had happened, and she knew the people. It was then that I spotted the deputy approaching the site the Chinese lady kept pointing to.
Deputy Alex Hampisch was on site and doing an investigation. He was in his early thirties, with a short, dark beard, but he had been on the force for fifteen years and was more of a veteran than most people in his department. His mother had been killed by a gang fight in DC when he was a child, and his father raised him along with his younger brother, Peter. Driven with a sense of purpose to deliver justice that is rarely found outside of comic book heroes, Alex joined the force at eighteen and now was amazingly five years away from “retirement” age.
I approached him while keeping Murphy on a very short leash. “G’mornin, officer,” I blurted, more asking than stating.
“Good morning,” he replied as he continued to squat above the body of a now deceased woman. “Please don’t come too close with the dog. This is a crime scene. What can I do for you mister . . . ?”
“Myers. My name is Josh Myers.” My curiosity had brought me this far, but now I realized I was probably just a nuisance to him.
“Well Mr. Myers, we have a dead woman here. I would normally call in CSI and have a dozen fellow officers closing off the scene so people like yourself couldn’t get this close, but today I don’t have shit. I also would have the fire department here too, but hell if I know where to find them.”
“Really, don’t you all have some secret walkie-talkies that are designed for this sort of thing?”
“No, we have radios and computers. We lost everything the same time everyone else did.“
“Oh,” I said, a bit perplexed. I had only assumed that police and other agencies were still coordinating and functioning. “How did people contact you about this scene?” I was curious if someone was brave during the night and ventured out while I cowered with the bat.
“Lucky chance, really. I live two miles down that way,” he said while pointing south to a small side street. “I usually leave my police car at the office and bike to work when the weather is nice. I’ve been there since Friday night and was going to head home this morning for a rest when I stumbled across this mess.”
It was then that I felt important again and decided I could help this investigation. “I think I heard this during the night. I heard a scream and then three gun shots.”
He squatted down again and gently pulled back the victim’s shirt, revealing three blood-soaked gun wounds. Looking up at me, eyes locked, he merely nodded his head in agreement and then looked around. He walked over to a side of the house that was exposed from the burns and through a door that was still closed. Within a minute, he reappeared and placed a blanket over her body. A purse was lying a few feet away, and he dug around for a driver’s license.
Murphy was ready to move again and didn’t like being near a body. To me, it felt like being in a TV show still and the reality that a dead person was at my feet hadn’t really settled in. “Any idea who did it?”
“Nope. Doubt we’ll find out either” came the instantaneous reply.
Dumbfounded, I looked at him. “Don’t you guys solve most of these murder cases?”
“In normal times, yeah. I can’t call for help from other offices. People from my department have already gone home to fend for their families, and there is almost nothing I can do. I can’t even take a damn picture for evidence. They only give us digital cameras these days, so I won’t have any Polaroids to pin up on the unsolved mysteries wall from this. The best we can do is to bury her. I’ll talk to the neighbors in a few days and then investigate as best we can when power eventually comes back, if ever.”
If I was dumbfounded a minute before, I now realize it was only a small thing compared to being shell-shocked now. Disbelief at witnessing the foundations of law and order break down in front of me was overpowering. A police officer who was giving up was how it seemed to me. More people now were looking at the wreckage of the house from across Plantation Road and the Chinese couple was backing away while still shouting some emotionally charged insults at whomever the culprits were as if they could hear and understand her.
“Mr. Myers, carefully step back please,” Alex asked with a sudden levelness in his voice.
As he was trained from a young age, I obeyed the officer and stepped back. I hadn’t been paying attention to Murphy, and looking down, I realized that he was being a naughty doggie. All that time, he was licking the ground. “Murphy! I shouted and tugged him back. No! Bad dog.” Murphy jolted with a whimper and immediately responded by moving. He looked up at me, and the look was mortifying. His snout and face were caked with miniscule chunks of gore and blood. He had found some intestines and been snacking while we conversed. Within a couple of seconds, I blew chunks and heaved up the last remaining bits of dinner the night before.
“Yeah, that’s pretty gross. You should head home and clean him up. Now you see why we put up the yellow tape?”
Coughing and wanting to vomit more, with that nasty burn taste that makes a voice instantly deeper, I answered, “Yes, I’m so, so sorry. This damn dog. I don’t know . . .”
“Don’t worry about it. She’s dead, Mr. Myers. I’m sure she won’t be the last body if we don’t get the power back soon. Most of our department has taken an immediate leave and gone home to look after their families. A couple of guys said they will stick around until tomorrow but then they have to hike back to Silver Spring to their loved ones as well. I’ll be around though. Me and my partner. Her name is Alex too. The department likes to joke and call us the Alex squared team. You see anything else or hear anything else crazy, you let us know. Not sure we can do much about it, but we’ll try. By the way, Mr. Myers, do you have a gun?”
Throat still burning and still so mad at the dog I could barely register what he was asking me. “A gun?”
“Yes, you see what happened here. Shit is hitting the fan fast, and as more people get away with crimes like this, at least for a while, it will encourage more to do the same. Law enforcement means well, but our manpower is almost non-existent. I still need to free a dozen people we arrested at LeapMart the other night. We don’t have the resources to keep them penned up and feed them. You go back to your family and people you trust, and you start talking to them about a militia.”
“A militia?” I again meekly answered. Instantly the thought of guys in white wigs and muskets staring down an army of red coats came to mind, but the idea had merit. There is strength in numbers, and this poor lady lying dead before me and her house burned down were proof of what could happen to individuals. Within my mind, this idea was gaining traction. “Yes, officer, I think I might just mention that to my neighbors.”
“Okay. You be on your way. Just so I know, what neighborhood do you live in?”
“Blennington Estates.”
“Okay, good. Only one main entrance. You all hunker down there and come up with contingency plans to deal with messes like this.”