Patient Zero
It was the middle of August, hot and muggy, the kind of sticky hot that makes you think of frosty cans of Coors and diving face first into a lake. I was standing in the remains of a small burned out cabin ten miles east of Raccoon City in the foothills of the Arklay Mountain Range. There wasn't a whole lot left-a stone chimney and some blackened footings. My shoes were covered with soot from kicking at scorched rubble and remnants of whatever had sat in the place. It was ten on a Friday morning and even the birds were unusually quiet in this heat.
This had been a Wayne County Sheriff's Office crime scene a week ago. Now it was mine. Detective Sergeant Ryan Robinson of the Raccoon City Police Department. I had driven out here in a red Ford Mustang along with Sam Ostic. The car was his privately owned vehicle, commonly referred in police circles as a POV. Sam was a sheriff's Deputy working D.R.A.I.N.O which was short for Downriver Anti Narcotics Unit, a multi jurisdictional task force located in Wayne county which operated out of Silverton which sat on the Au Sable River. DRAINO was a pork stew made up of RPD, State Police, a few reps from the Three letter government agencies and the Wayne County Sheriff's Department. Their sole goal was to stop the spread of crystal meth which had skyrocketed throughout the Midwest.
Sam Ostic was in his mid thirties, had olive colored skin and was movie star handsome with his oiled and slicked back jet black hair. He stood at 5'6 which is short compared to the typical big country boys that worked county, but he had earned the nickname "Scrappy" tossing around and getting the better in scuffles with the punch drunks that inhabited the drinking establishments in Wayne County. He was working meth labs for DRAINO. This one had exploded and burned to the ground. At first it was thought to be a gas leak, but the county fire teams had learned to call the cops if they saw chemistry glassware in the ruins. After they had raked the debris cold and began their fire investigation and discovered that broken test tubes and flasks were a majority of the debris, they called in the county sheriffs to test the soil. Low and behold the quantities were so great you could probably throw some of that soil in a pipe and get high as a kite. DRAINO was notified and that's what brought Sam here.
My reason for being at this crime scene, was a mite bit more depressing. Two kids had starved to death in a house in Raccoon City; one year old Cindy and her two year old Brother, Marcus. Their mother, Regina Applegate was a crystal addict with a laundry list of meth cooking busts in her file. Regina was currently sitting in county jail facing two manslaughter charges. The D.A. wanted to boot it up to Murder Two and had asked Special Crimes at RPD to look for extenuating circumstances. Since my partner Justin Pate was on a temporary leave of absence to be with his terminally ill mother in Florida, and since it was mostly a background check, which required no partner I got to work on that nasty double homicide by myself. The D.A. figured if he could file the bigger charges against Regina he could get her to roll on her ex boyfriend Matt Harries, a high-profile drug dealer. Regina had been banging him until a month ago, when she had finally gotten so tweaker thin he kicked her out of his place.
Once Deputy Ostic determined that this burned out shack had been Regina's place the sheriffs and RPD crime computers pinged on it, which brought both of us to this lovely crystal meth bonfire. Because Matt Harries was such a big player in the meth trade, I had been expecting to find a rather sizeable cook house. But now that I was here, I knew Id wasted the trip. This was just a small time tweaker kitchen where Regina had come out to cook her own personal batch of crystal to fry her brains out. I wondered to myself if little Cindy had crawled in the dirt out front while Marcus lay screaming in his filled days old diaper watching mommy shoot the moon. I wonder if she had ever gotten so tweaked out of her mind visiting Harries in Raccoon she had forgotten she had children, let alone the fact that they were slowly starving to death in their room.
So now I stood there in what remained of her cook house. A mirror hung in the bathroom and I caught a glimpse of my reflection. My blonde hair was faded from a zero on the sides, to around four inches on top and neatly combed over to the right. I was only 33 years old, but my steel blue eyes were the eyes of a man well beyond my years. Being a Marine combat veteran of the Gulf war, and ten years working the street had a way of doing that to a person. My looks were nothing special, maybe even a little rough you would say. I had a strong jaw that had served me well in my boxing days in the Corps, but had a face that had the occasional acne scar, or unevenness from too many blows. I towered over Sam, standing at 6'3 and weighing in around 240 lbs. I was good enough looking to be happily divorced from my beautiful Latina ex-wife Vanessa, who was working her way up the ladder at Umbrella. We had split after three years, both chasing careers that were keeping us away from each other for days on end though we slept and ate under the same roof.
My eyes moved to the bathtub where floating in the stagnant rain water that had collected there bobbed a half melted rubber ducky. I then wondered, if somebody had taken notice sooner could this horrific tragedy been avoided?
Crystal meth lies in the extreme category of Narcotics. Technically methamphetamine is the artificially synthesized version of the human body's natural adrenal hormone. You get your hands on a decent batch and it makes you feel beautiful, attractive and alert. The problem is that what it gives, it also takes away. If you use it for sex, you cant have an orgasm. Use it to stay awake at work, and you become whole fully inefficient at whatever task you are attempting to accomplish. By the time you figure out that its not quite the thing you need you start to get so drowsy you need to load up just to keep your eyes open. It's the devils drug, a ticket to hell. I've seen recovered heroin users, but not one single recovered meth addict. They take the ride all the way to the last stop.
The tragic deaths of Cindy and Marcus had bought Regina's trip ticket to county, and now I was out here trying to cash her in for a D.A. who really only wanted her boyfriend, Matt Harries. Just another cog in the machine of death and destruction.
Even before the divorce I was finding it more and more difficult to do the job. All I saw was human wreckage. Even when I succeeded in doing something that felt right, more often than not I was looking over my should for fear of being cursed for it. It was a pretty thankless job, most people don't want to see cops around. Most of the people in our society are sheep. They are kind, gentle, productive creatures who can only hurt one another by accident, that's nothing to say that there is anything inferior about that. Then there are the Wolves, the Wolves prey on and feed on the sheep with no mercy, no remorse. They are the truly evil people in this world, and they exist as evidenced in the burned out husk of a building I stood in. Then there are Sheepdogs, like myself who live to confront the Wolf. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath, a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? What do you have then? A sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero's path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed. The sheep generally despise the sheepdog. He looks a lot like the wolf. He has fangs and the capacity for violence. His very existence reminds them that somewhere out in the darkness the Wolf is lurking. The sheep would much rather have the sheepdog cash in his fangs, spray paint himself white, and go, "Baa." That is, until the wolf shows up.
"Hey brother you going to write any of this up?" Sam asked, snapping me out of my thoughts. "I got the WCSO Reports back at the station on disc. I can burn you a copy for your report. There's not much left here, any evidence was raked up by the crime techs. Whataya say we head back?"
"Yeah, lets roll" I said and wiped the sweat from my brow, noticing with disgust that my armpits were now sweating profusely.
We then sauntered back to the Mustang. My Jeep was parked back at the sheriffs substation where we met. Sam cranked the AC to max, and thankfully it was blowing ice cold air within a minute and after ten you might have called the confines of the vehicle a little too cold. Sam sped into the turns of the winding foothill roads with practiced efficiency. Sam and myself went through the police academy together 12 years ago, therefore the silence we currently enjoyed was not at all awkward, as we were best of friends and got together more often than not every weekend to grab a few beers and shoot pool.
"You hear? Six more hikers went missing this week." Sam spoke, breaking the silence.
"Six? I thought they closed down the roads and campgrounds in the area?"
" I found their vehicles myself Tuesday morning, parked in the state campground parking lot. Thought I was going to come across a deal going down, called in all the units in our zone. Ran the tags, both Ro's (Registered Owners) came up as missing persons. We checked the area, found where they had set up, there was blood everywhere but get this, they couldn't pull DNA from it, it was saturated with ammonia. Like someone sanitized the crime scene."
"What the hell…" I thought about the FBI's S.T.A.R.S. (Special Tactics and Rescue Squad) members who came back from the ruins of the old Arklay plantation deep in the foothills. They had said there were cannibals operating out of it. In their excited delirium they ranted about Umbrella covering it up, and that there was a research facility out there doing some kind of genetic experimentation. The state police and FBI had combed the area, and found the burned out mansion and several acres of old oak forest burnt to the ground but no bodies, not even the 9 S.T.A.R.S members listed as missing. The FBI whisked them away and they were gone as quickly as they had appeared. The violent Arklay Mountain murders were still unsolved, the death toll stood at 20 civlians and 9 law enforcement officers. Absolutely nobody had any idea what was going on, which in and of itself was extremely unsettling.
"How do you get so wired you forget about your own kids though?" Sam grumbled, changing the subject. "Its kinda bumming me out…"
"Maybe we should have went and been Firefighters?" I replied.
Thirty minutes later we had arrived back at the Sheriffs Station, where all hell was breaking loose. Sam almost hit a black and white Tahoe that came screaming out of the parking lot, with every single code light on the vehicle lit up like a Christmas tree. I could see the wide eyed adrenaline shocked face of the deputy behind the wheel as he activated his sirens and squealed down the road.
"That's the Watch Commander's vehicle, he wouldn't be leaving his desk unless-" Sam cut his sentence off when the front doors of the station flew open and six deputies came barreling through them, shotguns or patrol rifles in hand. All of them wearing heavy duty black tactical Kevlar vests which contrasted with the tan and brown sheriffs uniforms they wore.
"This cant be good." Sam said as he double parked the vehicle in the handicapped spot by the front door and ran inside.
I was RCPD and this was a Sheriff's department rollout. Could have been a bar fight that got a little out of control, could have been a domestic dispute where one of the belligerents discharged a firearm in a fit of anger, who knew. It wasn't my show.
I had reached my Jeep wrangler and had opened the door when Sam Ostic ran back out into the parking lot with an additional 4 deputies one of which was the old timer who was the desk sergeant. He was thumbing shotgun shells into a Remington M100 Riot Gun as they all packed into the small confines of a crown Victoria and sped off in the direction of the other vehicles. Sam didn't so much as glance in my direction, he was that pumped.
I reached into my glovebox and pulled out my Motorola portable police radio that was roughly the size of a concrete brick. The RPD and WCSO work on different radio frequencies, but due to the nature of my working with both agencies from time to time I had our comm guys program their frequency into my radio. After fiddling with the volume knob I immediately heard somebody screaming.
"Control, One-Charlie, 10-99 (Officer in Distress),Deputies down, One-Alpha and One-Bravo are down. Any units what is your ETA- BACK THE FUCK UP!" There was an audible gunshot then silence as the microphone was no longer being keyed by One-Charlie.
Something was up. Something was wrong. Jurisdictional confines be damned. Instead of turning left out of the parking lot and heading back towards Raccoon City, I turned right and followed the crown Vic that Sam was piloting.