“What have I done?”He was handed a thick file and asked to read it over.“If this is about the women, I’ll hire them back with a pay raise.I might have to take some of my own money to do that, but I’d be willing to do that to get out of trouble here.”
“You’ve been investigated, too, with the things that happened at theGolden Sheepout on Route Sixteen.”He didn’t touch the file, nor did he say anything.“It matters little now what you have to say about yourself.We’ve enough evidence to get you into enough jail time that you’ll be lucky if you ever see the light of day again.”
“I was new to the job.Someone should have come out there with me.At the very least, that Pennington woman should have gone out there with me.She’s the reason that all this went to shit.”He asked if he’d called in help.“No.Not until it was too late.I should have been told that I was in over my head the moment that I saw those bodies and the way they’d been shot.”
“Again, did you call anyone when you first noticed that this might not be your average killings?”He said that it wasn’t his fault.“Did you or did you not tell the Federal agency that you had only just arrived and things were just the way that they’d been left behind?Or that none of the bodies had been moved to better lighting.”
“Have you seen where his body was?No one could see if he’d been shot or not.I just had him pulled out of the area so that we could have a better look at his body.I think that was brilliant of me to have it taped off after his body was moved.”He was asked if he’d moved the bodies that had been found in the back of the restaurant.“They were in the way of us getting around.”
“Around to cooking yourself food, you mean.”He’d forgotten about that again.That he’d told his men to make sure that they got a good meal as they were going to be out there for a while.“Didn’t some of your men even eat in the dining room where the bodies were, because there was no room in the back for them to have a proper meal?I heard from one of the men that you said you couldn’t have afforded to eat there in the first place, that you were going to take full advantage of what you had in front of you.”
“It’s an expensive place to eat.”He asked him about what he’d had to eat.“I don’t remember.It might have been some chicken that was on the grill.”
“You had steak that one of your men cut up for you from the back room, where two dead bodies were.You even told the men to cook their own meals right over the body of the chef, but not to get anything on him.Was that what you said to your men, McGee?To not get anything on the bodies that were lying around?It sounds to me like you were at least thinking somewhat of evidence while you were in charge.”He told them that he’d covered them up from getting anything on them.“Yes, after you moved them from the position that they were in when they were shot.”
“Are you saying that I did a good thing?Because right now I’m thinking you don’t have a very high opinion of me and my skills as a chief of police.”He told him he was lucky he didn’t send him directly to prison for the number of things that he’d messed up.“I had to do something right.Christ, I was out there for five hours before the Feds had arrived.”
“Five hours?We heard you called them after letting some of the witnesses go.Which was it?”He said that it might have been more like six or seven hours after letting go of two of the witnesses.“Christ.I don’t even want to think about the amount of damage you did to the crime scene with all that time on your hands.Did you take reservations, too, while you were there?I heard that the phone did ring and you were answering it.”
“I just told them that they’d have to call back sometime next week.I thought for sure that it would be taken care of by then.”He thought of something.“This was before we found out that the place was cooking meth in the sub levels.That’s when we called the Feds to tell them what was going on.”
“By then, you’d already had all those hours to walk all over the crime scene and get food all over the victims, correct?”He told him again that he’d covered them up.“Fat lot of good it did when you’d already moved them out of the position they were in before you got there.How on earth did you make it out of the academy?”
Daniel didn’t bother telling him that he barely passed the exams.He figured that he more than likely already knew what sort of grade point average he’d made.That’s why he’d been so surprised that he’d made the cut for the chief of police in this small town.He figured that either they didn’t care or they didn’t look.Either way, he’d gotten the job and had been happy about it.
They asked him so many questions that he couldn’t keep them all straight.There was no lying for him to do either, since they seemed to know it all.When he was shown the pictures of the bodies, he was near sick; he’d been so exhausted by the questions.As soon as he was asked if he wanted any dinner, he leapt at the chance, thinking they’d let him go back to his cell.
“No, you’re going to eat right here and continue to answer questions.We’ve not even gotten to the things going on down in the sub levels yet.”He said that was when he called in the Feds.“Yes, five hours or so after you knew about it.Did you know that one of the witnesses was able to take out a pound of stuff with her when she left?”
“Candy Petree?”They said there was no such person as Candy Petree.“But I have her name on my notes at the office.She gave her particulars to my man up front when I told him to do it.”
“Well, it seems that she was smarter than you were and gave a fake name.You also threatened her when she got away from you.”He said that he was holding onto her name so that he could blame things on her.“You’re an idiot.I don’t know that I’ve ever said that to a fellow officer before.But you are an idiot.”
Daniel was beginning to feel that way, too.Like every little bit of smarts that he had was gone because of the way they were questioning him right now.He ate his lunch while they questioned him about the phone calls that he had taken.He didn’t understand what the big deal was; he’d not taken any kind of information from the calls.
“Did you think that the killers might have been calling in to see if they were going to be arrested soon?I would have.And to think you were telling them to call back next week, like it was going to be solved by then.The killers are probably thrilled that someone like you was in charge.I know that if Rosie Pennington had been in charge, there wouldn’t have been anything wrong with her case load.She would have called right away.”
“Then why didn’t she go out there with me?Do you have an answer to that?”They said that she no longer worked for the city.“If she was so good, they should have put her in charge and not me.I don’t know what you want from me, but I’m getting sick of all these questions.”
The men around the room laughed.Like it was funny that he was sick of the questions.Instead of cutting him a break like he wanted, he was told that he’d be questioned until they were ready to solve the case.Which, by their estimations, would be in about twenty years if ever.Daniel didn’t know howmuch longer he could take this and not be able to think.He’d never been one to think on his feet, and now was no different.They kept at him until his dinner came, and he needed to go to the bathroom.It was the only reprieve that he was able to get from their relentless questioning.
By midnight, he was ready to call it a day.He no longer tried to keep his lies straight but told the truth when asked.Sometimes he would mess up and try to blame the Candy person, but they’d bring him back around, and he’d be blaming himself.After hours of this treatment, he begged them for a bed.He was exhausted both mentally and physically and needed some sleep.
All they did was take him back to his cell.His room had been tossed, and his bed needed to be remade.Not having the energy to do anything like that, he simply laid down on his mattress and went to sleep.If there was any cover there for him to put in, he couldn’t reach it and did without.Tomorrow, they told him they were going to ask him more questions, and that would be all.He thought that he should have just stayed in bed the morning of the meeting with the townspeople and not thought about what it would be like to be chief of police.
By the next morning, he felt as if he’d not gotten a bit of sleep.He’d been worried to death over any kind of jail time he’d be spending and what was going to happen to his family.Not that he cared all that much for his family, but he did worry about how, without his wife’s money, he was going to make it in the world once he was out of jail.If he got out of jail.
Breakfast was donuts and coffee, not his favorite breakfast in the world, but he ate it so that he’d be able to get through the day.There was a whole new set of agents talking to him today, so he wasn’t prepared for their line of questioning.It was about the meth in the sublevels and how he’d handled himself there.He’d not.He’d fucked it up like he had the other part of the building and told them that.That must not have been a good answer because one of them popped him in the back of the head and told him to shut up, whining.
“I’m not whining, but finally telling you the truth.I was there in the sublevels, but the amount of bodies down there made me sick, so I made sure that my men went down.I don’t know who I sent because I hadn’t bothered to learn their names yet.For all I know, they could have been stealing the meth while they were down there and making a killing off of the stuff.”He was hit again.“I’m telling you the truth, damn it.I don’t know what else you want from me.”
For the next few hours, he answered the questions as truthfully as he could.Sometimes he’d have the answer to their questions, but most of the time he didn’t.He didn’t know who was in charge, and he didn’t know who had moved the bodies down there.For that matter, he didn’t know the names of the officers who had moved any of them on the upper floors either.He’d just ordered it done, and someone had done it.If he was honest, he told them, there were times when he didn’t even know who had been in charge of calling the feds for him.He’d done none of that.
He ate because they told him to do so, and he went to the bathroom when it was all right with them.He answered so many questions that his head was spinning around in knots.Once, he was ready to beg for one of them to just arrest him so that he could get out from under their questioning, but of course, that wouldn’t happen.As soon as he was released to go back to his cell, he dragged his sorry ass back there and fell into the mattress that was still on the floor.
Daniel was going to prison.They’d made that perfectly clear to him.How much time he was going to spend there was up in the air, but they told him that he’d be lucky if he were to be out by the time he was drawing social security.That was still forty-plus years away.
~*~
