I rested a hand on Judith’s shoulder. “You okay?”
“(Is that… his?)” she whisper-asked.
I was able to get a ‘good’ enough whiff of the lump of denim on the floor without getting any closer. “Almost certainly.” I pointed at the pile of white fabric next to it. “This looks like his ‘piggy bank’ tee.” I got as close as I could without touching it and was able to make out cuts on the sleeves (which I theorized were made to remove it while he was restrained or bound) and, with a lot of squinting, the shirt’s print: the words ‘Smash The Piggy Bank’ surrounding a piggy bank dressed in police blues suffering a blow from a hammer. “Yep. This is the shirt he was wearing. He was here, alright.”
“Damn. Whatever happened here, it was bad enough that he shat his pants.”
I examined a brownish-red patch on the carpet, mostly hidden under the pants. “Blood, at least a couple days old. They hurt him. That and the underwear are strong evidence of torture.”
She gasped in horror. “No! Don’t say that, it’s an awful image!”
“You have to be able to imagine horrible things if you’re gonna be a detective.”
“(Ugh. I don’t like this.)”
“It could be worse. We could have found something more exciting than some shit-stained pants. Such as a three-day-old decomposing carcass, which we would then have to get up close to inspect. And that would smell way worse than half-dried human shit.”
“You’re awful for suggesting that could have been a possibility.”
“Realistic, not awful. It still is a possibility. We have no idea if his captors have killed him. The next evidence we find could very well be his cadaver.”
“I’m not enjoying looking at evidence of a good man suffering inhumane treatment, and I’m enjoying speculating about his death even less.”
“She’s being a little bitch,” opined Shosh.
I gave her a dirty look. “There’s nothing wrong with being upset by human suffering.” I turned to Judith. “But, Judith, you’re gonna have to get used to this and worse if you want to be my partner in solving crime.”
“I don’t want to ‘get used to this and worse’. The day I see a dead body and don’t feel the urge to puke is the day I lose my humanity. Do you want to get used to that shit?”
{I touch my mother’s face, even paler than normal, as pale as the sheet the medical examiner has pulled back. As caked in blood as she is, I can still recognize her nose, broken, just as small and round as mine—she’d gotten it from her mother, according to her, and I from mine. Her hair has the same red curls, but it’s much longer—she swore she’d never cover or cut it above her waist. And her eyes, the only features unscathed by the hit-and-run—not green like mine, but a shade paler than sapphires, the stuff day skies are made of. Our eyes and our speech were the only ways anyone knew how to tell us apart. Even our freckles looked identical, but as I look down on her now… hers aren’t easy to make out among the lacerations and abrasions.
{“It’s her,” I tell the medical examiner coldly.
{“I’m sorry for your loss,” he says as he covers her back up.
{“You can’t imagine my loss,” I whisper, too quietly for him to hear. “Even if you lost me, you wouldn’t understand.”
{“I hope you never lose your daughter,” she replies, voice muffled beneath the sheet.
{“I could kill myself.”
{“You still have something to live for.”
{“What else but you?”
{“Your first homicide case, Esti. Which, yeah, happens to be none other than me.”
{The medical examiner puts her away and bids me, “Fare well,” and the detective who brought me here—the detective with my dream job—lets me out.
{The next time I see the woman who was my entire world, she comes to me in a box too small to hold even a bag of sugar.}
“I’m already used to it,” I informed my single and most important living friend.
“What do you mean?”
“When I identified my… my mother’s body in the morgue, that was enough for me. If getting used to seeing death means losing my humanity… then I lost mine thirteen years ago.” Shosh looked like she wanted to tell me something—something she had told me countless times, and desperately pleaded with me over just as many—but chose to keep her mouth shut. And I was relieved she did.
“When I said ‘lose my humanity’, I didn’t mean it literally.”
“Sometimes people mistook us for twins, and sometimes that’s exactly what it felt like we were. My twin was dead, so I was dead, too. Death, as much as life, became meaningless.”
“I’m sorry. I regret what I said.”
“Her parents, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, cousins—none of them came to her memorial service, none of them took any of her ashes home with them. I was all the family she had, and she was all the family—all the everything I had. When I fully accepted that I had lost her, I lost my humanity.”
“I’m so sorry you feel that way, but please don’t take what I said to heart,” she pleaded.
“That’s impossible. It’s simply the Truth, and a detective can never ignore the Truth or she ceases to be its agent.”
Judith’s face contorted in dismay, but she said nothing more.
“That isn’t the Truth,” murmured Shosh. “But I’m tired of arguing with you.”
“I don’t feel like beating a dead horse, either. We all need to look for more clues, however small. Just try your hardest not to touch or step on anything.”
“You got it, boss,” replied Judith, perhaps eager to move onto any topic besides my confession.
We poured over every nook and cranny of the room and adjacent bathroom for anything potentially valuable; we found a single half-inch-long blond hair in the sink, fingerprints on the sort of rocks glass typically found in hotel rooms, and a black backpack with all the items on Geraldine’s checklist—except, as we expected, the GPS tracker.
All told, there wasn’t much to go off of; with an “Esti, stop! Look closer!” Shosh concluded our search with the find of a fine, blue, helical, plastic fiber embedded in the carpet—which I had nearly stepped on—no more than a centimeter in length nor more than half a millimeter in diameter. “Rope. Tied up,” she suggested.
I nodded. “Yep. His wrists or arms must’ve been bound at some point.”
“What makes you think that?” asked Judith.
“This plastic fiber in the carpet, of course,” I replied. “Could be from a rope.”
She came over and had a look at Shosh’s find. “Wow. That… is an amazing find, you have excellent eyes. You’re surprisingly good at noticing clues.” Quickly, she added, “—I mean, not ‘surprisingly’, I meant to say ‘impressively’. I expected you to be good, but you’re even better than I expected.” She caught her breath. “Is there anything here that hints at this possibly being police work?” asked Judith.
“I don’t see any reason to…” I had been carefully avoiding this line of thinking. “Hmmm…”
“Be honest, Andy. You won’t be solving any crimes if you lie to yourself about who your suspects are.”
“…mmm— Okay. So, either this would’ve been a black op, off-the-books and out-of-uniform, so that if the operatives were caught the department had plausible deniability that the leadership was involved… or it was a lone wolf or wolves, possibly a police gang.”
“A ‘police gang’?”
“Oh, yeah, some police departments have gangs. They enforce blue solidarity through threats and violence, and they also intimidate marginalized officers into quitting. And sometimes they deal in drugs or gambling or sex trafficking. The officers in the largest of our local gangs call themselves ‘Castle’s Knights’, and the brass have done next to nothing to deal with them.”
“Christ Almighty, the police get worse and worse the more I learn about them.”
I nodded. “I don’t want to admit this, but… we cannot eliminate the police. Especially if they were acting without unofficial sanction from leadership.”
“I never thoughta them as rotten,” remarked Shosh. “Surely they aren’t as bad as she thinks they are?”
“I wouldn’t put kidnapping beyond their capabilities. — We should be photographing these items.” I opened my camera app and got to snapping the evidence we’d found so far.
Shosh summarized, “They grabbed him on the street, bound his hands, and dragged him here, where they did things to him until he crapped his pants, then they took off his clothes—whether they gave him new rags is anybody’s guess. And this all happened sometime between 9:30-ish and 9:51.”
“Yes. That.”
“‘That’?” asked Judith, who I just then remembered could not see or hear Shosh. “What are you talking about?”
“Right, that is, he was tied up somewhere else, brought up here, manhandled, stripped and possibly given new clothes, then taken away.”
“Yet no one witnessed him being brought into the building, just maybe sitting peacefully in the car.”
“Yeah, unfortunately.”
Our thoughts stewed just long enough for Judith to ask, “Are we done? I really want to get out of here. I know he didn’t die in here, but this room still feels haunted as fuck.”
“We need more clues,” pointed out Shosh.
“We do, but I can’t think of anything else to inspect around here.”
Judith gave me a puzzled stare. “Oh… kay, so is that a ‘yes’?”
“Uh—yeah?” We left the door untouched as we exited the room. “If only there were some cameras on this str—” And right as we began down the stairs, I had an epiphany that stopped me in my tracks. “Dash cams and body cams!”
Judith’s eyes spread wide. “Of course! But how do we get video evidence from the police?”
“Shit.” I sighed. “The only way I can think of would be through a Right to Know Act request, but we’ll have to prove there was ‘great bodily harm’ involved, and there weren’t any hoots indicating that the raid officers were violent enough to fulfill that requirement.”
“So we’re fucked.”
“Well…”
“Who watches the watchmen?” asked Shosh.
“That may be our only option.”
“What may be our only option?” asked a confused Judith.
“If somebody were to tip off Internal Affairs, then they could—”
“The cop-cops? Really, Andy? Those bastards aren’t gonna do shit!”
“They nab officers for taking bribes all the time, they’ll go all-in to solve something exciting for once.”
“What part of ‘All Cops Are Bastards’ do you not understand, Andrea? They aren’t gonna send a fellow cop to prison for that amount of time—they’re gonna sweep it under the rug.”
“Maybe, but—would you at least admit there’s a possibility that if they’re alerted, they’ll actually try to solve the kidnapping?”
“I’m feeling super confident about your idea,” she replied sarcastically. “We’ll just ask Internal Affairs to take over the case and let them do all the hard work for us. How do you know they aren’t in on it?”
“Okay, remember—we don’t know with a hundred percent certainty that the kidnappers were cops, in fact we have no convincing evidence implying that they were involved in the kidnapping in any way at all. I’ll admit I don’t know that IA wouldn’t cover up any hypothetical police involvement, but they would be our only option before we resorted to more extreme measures.”
“I don’t like involving any part of the fuzz, or Andy Griffith, or the Fuckwad Buttholes of Investigation, or Interpol. I say we keep snooping on our own terms and keep them the hell away from this scene.”
“I would want to keep this under wraps, too, but I need you to understand the cops are better equipped to police themselves than we are. Our only choice should we suspect police involvement would be to alert IA that officers might be involved.”
She shook her head. “If we report that room, everything inside it is gonna evaporate.”
“Maybe, maybe not. We can be certain, though, that it must disappear eventually, whether we report it or not. The carpet will be replaced, the clothes will be incinerated, and the room will be scrubbed clean to prepare it for its next inhabitants. We’re going to have to call this into the authorities before that happens.”
“Listen,” insisted Judith. I gave her both of my ears. “You should know by now not to trust cops.”
“The officers who rounded up the sex workers on Wednesday would have been acting on Vice’s orders, so assuming it was the fuzz, my money would be on Vice being the ones who nabbed him. Meanwhile, the people investigating his disappearance are gonna be from Crimes Against Persons.”
“What difference does it make?”
Shosh took this tangent as an opportunity to whisper into my ear, “(And who’s the gumshoe who’s gonna be investigating the crime?)”
“(Well…)”
“(It’s the only way, Esti. The only way to save Alexander Brookvale.)”
“Well?” asked Judith.
“(And solve the next part of this mystery.)”
“Well,” I carefully ventured, “the CAP Detective on the case could be… me.”
“Andy… I think you might want to examine what you just said and ask yourself whether it makes any sense.”
It was a stupid thing to suggest, but Shosh kept whispering my dream into my ear like a bedtime story we’d made up where I was the protagonist—one among a legion of variations—so I kept saying stupid things. “My john from earlier was Captain Diane Somers, First Precinct Vice Squad. And she offered me a job that I almost couldn’t turn down.”
She stared at me, a little shocked… but to a greater extent angry. “You’re kidding. You wouldn’t.”
“In exchange for me being her… ‘sex slave’.”
Her tone simmered. “Vice Captain’s sex slave! Are you seriously considering going back? After building trust with the people on this street, you’d betray them and go back to being a pig?”
“You said Columbo is an exception to ACAB.”
She explained with bated fury, “Columbo is a fictional character, Andy.”
“You also told me, quote, ‘And if you had become a homicide detective, maybe I would have considered you an exception, too.’” It was difficult to access such a low vocal range as I imitated her speech, but I dare say that my impression would have fooled even her closest friends and family no less spectacularly.
But my perfect emulation of her speaking did not persuade her to calm down and see reason—to the contrary, it pissed her off even more. “Are you mocking me?”
“No! I’m just quoting you as accurately as I can.”
“Sure. You should know I wasn’t being serious when I said that. Columbo is a bastard, and you seem to want to become a bastard all over again.”
“Wow. Is it just me, Esti, or did she just transform into a bitch on a dime?”
I wanted to tell Shosh that I needed her to keep her comments to herself because I sensed that I had just planted both of my feet right in the middle of the biggest, smelliest, deepest shit ever taken, and was desperate not to lose my only flesh-and-blood friend. I did the only thing I could do when faced with an impossible situation: delicately, and with as much sincerity as I could muster, accept all blame, regardless of whether I believed that I deserved it.
I chose not to tell her that I hadn’t considered the possibility that her ‘joke’ (if a joke it truly was) had been intended to be humorous. “I’m sorry, Judith. I misrepresented your joke as serious. ACAB has no exceptions, and that includes me. I will endeavor to be more careful in the future in distinguishing humor from sincerity.”
She cooled off a little, so I decided to continue navigating the minefield I had wandered into… but rather than retreat to safety, I decided to keep moving forward. “That said—the only way this investigation gets off the ground is with technology and techniques which we, as civilians, do not have access to. As a Crimes Against Persons bastard I’d be able to pull the video we need without justification, I could look up potential suspects and witnesses on NCIC and the various Person of Interest Databases maintained by the department, I’d have access to—though God forbid there is one—an autopsy before anybody else, I could have the latent prints we found run through IAFIS—that’s the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, an FBI database that just so happens to contain the prints of every police officer in the country, so if by some twist of fate police were involved and they left behind those fingerprints we found, we are guaranteed to catch them. And if I catch the bastards who did this, I can have them arrested and tried for their crimes. I can’t do any of that as a humble private investigator.”
As I talked, Judith’s expression softened, until all that was left was worry and anxiety.
“I’ll quit as soon as I’m done, Judith.”
“Christ, fuck me, this is insane… You better.” ((Yes! Yes-yes-yes-yes-yes!)) I nearly failed to suppress the grin that attempted to usurp my face. “And we’re not gonna tell a soul that you’re a cop again. You leave your badge on your desk when you go home, you don’t go to cop retirement parties, you don’t talk to cops except to tell them that you don’t talk to them without your lawyer, and when you talk to anybody else, you act like you’re a fellow civilian.”
“So I’m permanently undercover.”
She nodded. “Exactly.”
I sighed. “That’s probably for the best. So you’re okay with me doing this?”
She groaned. “No, I fucking hate it, but you seem to think it’s the only way forward, and I can’t think of a single damned alternative.”
“Alright.” I paused my descent and looked back up the stairwell, in the general direction of room 410. “Once I’m in CAP, I’ll arrange for someone to send in an anonymous tip for a ‘large’ blood pool indicative of a potential assault or homicide—I’ll be fresh aboard with no caseload, so they’ll assign it straight to me, and I’ll have the room scoured from floor to ceiling. I’m hoping those doorknobs and that liquor glass turn up something good. Let’s go.”
We got into Banana Shark and headed back to my apartment in pensive silence—not even Shosh had anything to say throughout the ride.
Thus arrived the next stage of our investigation: sitting on my couch, fretting about my job prospects. “Are you sure this is the only way forward?” asked Judith.
“It’s the only path I can see getting us anywhere but backwards.”
“I’m just happy my Esti’s gonna have her dream job.”
Judith groaned. “I really don’t like this.”
“I know. I don’t like it either. I hate it.”
“Fuckin’ liar,” Shosh scoffed affectionately.
“I’m not lying, I really mean it,” I insisted as my tone of voice and facial expression reached enthusiastically into the forbidden cookie jar and scooped up snacks by the handful in full view of both of my best friends. “I feel good now that I’m no longer a cop—people like me, they trust me, they let me into their worlds and help me when I need it.” That much was true. “I don’t want to give this up. I’d… I’d rather be just a sex worker than a cop again.” And that much was not.
“Really?” asked Judith.
“(No,)” murmured Shosh in disbelief. “(My baby isn’t a hooker. You only did it the one time, and only to gain their trust, and never again.)”
“I would totally do it again. I had fun doing it. I enjoy sex work, it’s been a lucrative and satisfying gig so far, and I could still do private investigation during the day.”
“That’s certainly an option,” said Judith with a dash of relief. “And I would much prefer that. You have my blessing and full support if that’s what you decide to do.”
“Maybe that would be better. Maybe…”
Shosh shook her head. “Mishigas. Stop. Shut up, you’re a police detective.” She had never been like this to me, never told me what to do. And now she was using Yiddish words and acting like the bossy adult she had never been.
And I had no patience for her sudden rash of imperiousness. “I’m not finished. Notwithstanding my eagerness to moonlight as a sex worker… as a private eye without contacts inside the department, I simply don’t have access to the resources that a badge would give me. And I need those resources in order to solve the case. I need the dash cam and body cam and traffic cam footage, the fingerprints, the DNA from the blood, closed-source intel on all the organizations that could have done this, access to search warrants, and possibly the power to detain people. But… we must bear in mind, I’ll be selling my body.”
“Shit. I’m sorry,” said both of them in unison.
“Well—she’s handsome, which is a look that’s growing on me. I’ll survive.”
Judith sighed. “Christ. Just promise me you won’t fall for her.”
Shosh stared at her, then at me, in disapproval. “I can’t believe I forgot about that caveat. Are you gonna enjoy being someone’s concubine, someone’s fucking sex toy?”
“I’ll try not to,” I claimed. Shosh looked down and shook her head, trying but failing to hide what appeared to be mixed feelings. We sat in silence for a while, before I worked up the courage to ask, “Sleepover?”
Judith sighed. “You said you take up the whole bed at night, I don’t want to come between you and your sleep. Especially if you’re going to be working a regular shift again.”
“It’s fine. Sometimes my junk ends up piled up on one side of the bed and I only have half as much room—and I sleep just as well.”
“Nah. I really don’t want to get in the way.”
“Okay, you won’t take the hint, so I’ll spell it out. I’ve never shared a bed with anybody. I wanna know what it’s like to spend the night… close to another body.”
“I’m gonna give you two some privacy,” said Shosh before evaporating.
“Oh? If that’s the case, I can stay,” said Judith. “Let me go get my pie-jammers.” While she did that, I changed into the shirt I used to wear to bed while my mother was still alive. Judith returned wearing plaid flannel pants and an oversized T-shirt printed with Hello Kitty wearing a black bow on her head, black trench coat, ripped fishnets, black spiked collar, cross necklace, chains, and bold black eyeliner.
Judith looked me up and down and smirked softly. “Carnival of Sins. I never would have pegged you for a Crüe Head.”
{Vince Neil is saying something from the stage, but Shosh distracts me with a twisted-up sausage of very thin paper the size of my pinky finger, one end softly burning like the coals of a campfire somebody fed a dead skunk.
{“Shosh, is this…?”
{“Just suck it in your lungs, hold it for a couple of seconds, pass it to the next person, and let it out.” I timidly follow her instructions, and cough so hard I think my throat is going to rupture. “Try not to cough! The more you cough, the more you wanna cough!” I reel in the urge, and eventually regain control of my lungs. “Didja get any?”
{“A little,” I gasp.
{“Take another puff.” I manage to breathe it in, hold it, and release a sizable cloud. “That’s my Esti!”
{“Who do I pass it to?”
{“Me, duh.” She holds out her hand and I pass it back. She takes another lungful herself, then I take mine. The joint goes back and forth until all that remains is a nub of paper. By then I’m well and truly stupid. I don’t understand the music, I just enjoy it as I join Shosh in cheering and hopping up and down.}
“Not really. I got the shirt at a concert,” I informed Judith. “My best friend’s birthday.”
“That’s sweet. You wear that every night?”
“No, I prefer to sleep without clothes.”
“(Ohhh…?) Well… if sleeping over becomes a regular thing for us… don’t feel obligated to change your habits for my comfort. I have zero problems with you sleeping in the buff next to me.”
I smiled as I took it off. “Don’t mind if I do.” We got into bed and made ourselves comfy. I snuggled up with her and felt happy. And as her warmth touched me, as my breasts pressed against her back, as coffee and weed peeked through her deodorant… I wanted to be even happier. So I reached around and grabbed a tit.
“Andy?”
“Yes?”
“My entire brain is stuck worrying about Alex, so I don’t think sex is gonna be able to hold my attention long enough to satisfy you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Any other day I would take you copping a feel as an invitation to start fucking your naughty ass, but tonight… I need to relax and try to empty my mind of my worries about where he is now and whether we’ll find him and the smell in that room and my fears about how horribly he must’ve suffered and how he might still be suffering. And you need to re-establish your professional sleep schedule before you can get back to working for the villains.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Can you take your hand off my boob?”
I removed it. “Oh. Sorry.”
“We can have some sex tomorrow, ’kay? Assuming we don’t see another crime scene implying our guy suffered horribly.”
“Sure. Thank you.” In building up the courage to grab her breast, I had worked myself up to needing stimulation. “Since we’re not doing any sex things tonight, do you mind if I take care of… my…”
“Are you horny?”
“Every second since you gave me my first kiss. But, yes, especially right now.”
“Needs are needs. But be quick about it.”
Having perfected the art of masturbation, it didn’t take me long to speed through the process, and I fell asleep half an hour later, as I came for the seventh time that night.