“I’m sorry I startled you, Jack. I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“Still following me after twelve years, Detective? Maybe it’s time to give up the ghost.” I smiled. I knew she wasn’t following me, but it was always fun to take a jab at her.
“Just visiting a friend, saw you, and thought I’d say hello,” she said.
“Stack?”
She nodded.
Dalton was standing at the edge of the pond, his hand set to launch another rock across the surface. He eyed the detective suspiciously.
“It’s okay, Dalton. She’s a friend.”
“She looks like a cop.”
“Yeah, I suppose she does.”
He returned to the water.
I stood, brushed off the knees of my jeans, and went over to her.
She told me about Detective Terrance Stack years back, after the dust began to settle but hadn’t quite left the air yet. David and some of the people in white had left him tied up in one of his bedrooms. If not for his mailman, he might have died up there. The mailman knew Stack rarely left home, and when letters piled up for three days, he tried the front door, found it open, and took it upon himself to make sure everything was okay.
Everything was not okay.
Stack, still tied to a chair, was severely dehydrated, delusional, ranting about his dead partner Faustino Brier. He spent nearly a week in the hospital recuperating before being permitted back home again. He passed away six months after that. Fogel found him in his favorite chair, a beer in one hand and a cannon of a gun in the other, staring out his front window. Cause of death was ruled a stroke. The way Fogel told it, the man was waiting for death to come knocking at his door. Bored with retirement, more so after Charter fell.
The day Fogel located David’s old cell at the heart of Charter, she called in backup. She brought in the feds. They tore the place apart. Not before she was able to watch the first video tape, though. The one that showed David stepping out of his cell, entering that control room, and saying something like, “Which button activates the building’s intercom?” A man with only one remaining eye showed him, then: “Hello, everyone, my name is David Pickford. As of this moment, I’m in charge of all Charter activities. Please listen closely…” The same tape contained the deaths of the two men in the control room shortly after.
Fogel regretted calling in the feds. They hauled off nearly three tractor trailers filled with documentation, audio/visual evidence, and equipment, enough to build a thousand cases against the people in charge. Although those tractor trailers left Charter property for the Philly field office, they never arrived. When Fogel tried to obtain information on the case, she discovered there was no case. When she took it upon herself to visit the Charter building again, less than one week later, she found it completely deserted, scrubbed, and staged. Signage had been replaced with Marshal Field and Grain. The few scraps of paper littering the now bloodless hallways bore the same name. The entire complex looked like a farming supply company that had gone out of business several years earlier, a building yet to be repurposed.
If I hadn’t given her all the documentation my father stole from Charter, there might not have been any remaining proof of what they did. Once Stack recuperated, the two of them worked to piece together a complete narrative, and by the time they finished, they knew all about the shot, the adults who received it, the children they had, and how Charter either exploited or killed all those involved.
Fogel took down the Wall of Weird shortly after that. Publicly, she ceased all efforts to follow up on those cases, and the information was quickly forgotten as her coworkers attempted to keep up with their ever-expanding workload. When August 8 rolled around the following year, only a handful asked about it. By the following year, no one brought it up.
She never told me where she hid all the data. She only said it was someplace safe. Someplace she could get to it, if the need ever arose.
“He’s getting so big!” Fogel beamed, watching Dalton.
“Yeah, they do that,” I said. “How have you been?”
“Good.” She reached into her pocket and took out her badge. “I made lieutenant.”
“Congratulations. I’m happy for you.” The words didn’t come out with the cheer I had intended. I tried to make up for it with a wider smile. I probably just looked like a complete goof.
There was a silver flask in her hand. She caught me staring at it.
Fogel’s face flushed. “It’s whiskey. I pour it on his grave. A little old school, I know, but he was old school back when old schools had dirt floors.” She hesitated for a second, then held it out to me. “Want a taste?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t touched the stuff in twelve years.”
This seemed to surprise her. “Really? That’s fantastic. Good for you.”
Fogel stuffed the flask into her pocket and nodded her head back toward the main entrance. “I need to get going. It was nice seeing you again. We should try to get together at some point. Maybe grab dinner or something.”
“I’d like that.” We never would, though. I knew that.
I watched her walk away, disappear over the hill. Then I turned to Dalton. “Let’s go, buddy.”
