June 25 1998 Raccoon City
It didn't take long after Forest had shipped to Fort Carson for his reputation to follow. Soon, every man on base knew that he had been to the Balkans and put some rounds through his M-24. As a result, very few soldiers ever bothered to ask what he was doing out of bed at three-thirty in the morning on a weeknight. For those who did, a quick puff of the chest and some smart comment about how "a Special Forces soldier slept when he was dead" was always enough to deflect the question. Even the fuzzy recruits had enough sense to catch the subtext in that message, Sergeant Speyer was hardass, so leave him the fuck alone.
In those final three hundred and twenty nine days of his contract with Uncle Sam, Forest chewed Red Man tobacco and chain drank strong coffee. It helped soften, but never fully countered the crushing exhaustion that went hand in hand with a lifestyle that involved an average of three hours' sleep a night. When the shakes got bad enough, an illicit supply of Carbamazepine kept his hands steady. Coupled with all the stimulants in his system the stuff gave him head splitting migraines, but a sniper was no good if he shook like a palsied old man as soon as drew a bead, and so he suffered through it.
Not once did it occur to him to see a military shrink about his troubles. The Speyer family had a long line of proud soldiers who's history had stretched back to the American Revolution, fighting stock, his Pa called them. Both grandparents had answered the call and fought the Germans. His father and uncles hadn't waited to be drafted to fight in Vietnam, and Uncle Willard never made it home. Not a one them deserved to have their good names dishonoured by their gutless progeny.
And so he endured the nightmares, the sleepless nights and tremors that had come to define his time at Fort Carson. He finished his time in the Tenth Special Forces Group with a flawless service record and then ran from his Army career like a yellow dog with his ass kicked in.
Of course, things were better now. Fort Carson was thousands of miles away. He was sleeping more; his hands were steadier. The television never bothered inquiring why he would choose to watch a Saint Louis Cardinals rebroadcast at a quarter to four. His co-workers at the Racoon Police Department had always known him as a night-owl, and so no questions were asked. Most importantly he was far enough away from Arkansas to be an embarrassment to his family.
Forest shifted in his recliner and scratched at his stubbly chin. He would finish watching the game, hit the gym, shower, and then grab some chow. He would still be at the Larch Street Precinct a half-hour early, ready for another day as one of Raccoon City's finest.
He shook his head and chuckled softly. The laughter sounded very lonely in his barracks-like apartment.
-Officer Forest Speyer, who'd have thought?-
It was actually a tip from his old Commanding Officer, a fellow Arkansawer he had gotten along with, that had led him to his current job. For the past two years he had been the RPD's Special Tactics and Rescue Service sharpshooter. At least his official title was sharpshooter, in reality he hadn't even held his rifle for months. Most times his unit, Bravo team, handled the search and rescue missions, while the more experienced STARS Alpha handled the action. This was fine by him, though. His hands didn't jitter when he chambered a round anymore, but that didn't mean that he wanted to push things. The less he had to use his rifle, the better.
He took his eyes off of the old TV and glanced at the family photo nailed to the wall.
As a boy he would spend quite a bit of time peering at the grainy old framed photographs above his parent's fireplace. Four generations of Speyer men, all with long hillbilly faces, standing stiffly in their uniforms. On the mantle, among all the black and whites was a single colour photo, of his father's youngest brother, Willard. He was handsome for a Speyer, dressed in a smart looking green uniform with a matching beret cocked on his head. Forest had grown up hearing the stories about Uncle Willard. How he had been a Special Forces soldier called a Green Beret. Of how he and his unit had raided a North Vietnamese POW camp; that Uncle Willard had died so another soldier could go home to his family. Even as a ten year old runt who could barely handle a .22 rimfire, Forest had known what he wanted, he wanted his own green beret.
Forest stuck to his guns and enlisted shortly after graduation. It had taken three years of nonstop training to make it from an Eleven Bravo infantry grunt to Special Forces. One-thousand ninety-five were devoted to training, drilling, discipline, trips to the PX barber every third Friday to get the bristles sharpened on his brush cut. One hundred sixty-eight weeks spent either on the range, at the gym, or in a classroom. Corporal Speyer lived and breathed Army. Corporal Speyer was hardcore, Hoo-Rah!
He turned twenty-two on a troop plane somewhere over the Atlantic, a guts and glory Sergeant fresh out of his Eighteen Bravo MOS and en-route to Stuttgart for deployment with the Tenth Special Forces Group. He had made it, he was a Green Beret. What a shame it was that he had turned out to be an outright failure as a soldier, a washed up nerve case after seven years' service. So much for fighting stock.
He supposed being a cop would be the best he could do. He was the first of any of his kin to get on with the law, and his folks claimed that he had done them proud. He glanced around the room and wondered how proud his Pa would be if he saw his son right now. Four days of scruff on his jaw, pigsty apartment, grease-ball hair. He knew that his Ma worried about him. She could tell that something had been eating him ever since he got back from Europe, but his Ma had also married a Speyer man. She knew better than anyone else that the Speyer menfolk dealt with their problems by themselves. "A man's troubles belong to him and him alone." How many times had he heard his Pa say that?
Forest started as a discordant jangle rang through his apartment. It took a few seconds for it to register that it was his telephone, ringing. He eyed it with suspicion. Sullivan and Aiken were on call tonight, so it probably wasn't work. His old Army buds weren't the chatty type.
That only left one option.
-Family-
Family trouble, to be exact. His Pa already had one heart attack while he was in Bosnia, and Grand-Dad Speyer had cancer. Late night phone calls only meant bad things. His pulse quickened as he grabbed the phone, knocking over a plastic Burger King collectors cup full of water.
"Hullo,"
"Hey," the female voice on the other line answered slowly.
Forest sighed; he recognised the voice, not family.
-Irene-
He had been up in Lane County with STARS Bravo for the past two weeks, dredging a lake for the bodies of four college kids who went missing during a canoe trip. He hadn't spoken to her since he had left. He glanced over at his microwave, the clock read twenty after four.
"Did I wake you up?" she asked.
"Naw, I'm awake."
"Whatcha up to?"
"Watching a ball game." She had called him up to make small talk?
"Oh yeah, who's playing?"
"Saint Louis and Cleveland,"
"Who's ahead?"
"Cleveland in the sixth, by three,"
"Hmmm,"
Forest frowned; he could hear traffic on the other end of the line, and something that sounded an awful lot like a diesel engine.
"Where you calling from Reen?" he asked.
"A pay phone at Emmy's truck stop. You want to grab some breakfast with me?"
Forest frowned again. Irene had the day off, and was not an early riser by any means. The few times he had stayed over, she had slept like the dead until her alarm went off, and then mashed the snooze button at least another half dozen times.
"Yeah, sure," he said. Officer Lindstrom may have been acting strange, but breakfast sounded pretty good, especially with a bit of company. His stomach grumbled in agreement. "Gimme about fifteen minutes all right?"
"Okay, I'll see you in a bit."
"Yep." Forest hung up the phone, righted the cup, and grabbed his wallet.
Fourteen minutes later, he swung his pickup off Alder Street into Emmy's expansive parking lot. He cruised past a long rank of idling big rigs and pulled into a spot set aside for four wheelers. He climbed out of his truck and cast a quick eye around the lot; Irene's Toyota was nowhere to be seen. She did say Emmy's.
Puzzled, he glanced over at the restaurant, which was lit up like a fishbowl this late at night. Most booths were empty, but as he squinted he noticed a woman with long blonde hair sipping coffee near the far wall.
He started for the doors, surveying the parking lot and surrounding streets.
He stepped through the doors, the air was overly air conditioned and thick with grease. The air-conditioning he could do without, but the grease only roused his appetite further. Heavy foods had never bothered him any; even before a route march in basic training he could chow down on sausages and fried eggs. What had his old Drill Instructor called him? Iron Gut?
Irene poked her head up from her newspaper and gave a quick wave. She wasn't the prettiest thing he had ever met, but she was a decent woman who loved baseball and gave him plenty of space, and that was all he asked for.
He returned her wave and walked over.
"Where's your truck?" He plopped into the red vinyl covered booth. "Broke down again?"
Irene shook her head. She was four years younger than him but tonight she looked a decade older, with pouchy bags under her eyes and long creases around her mouth. Forest had seen that face thousands of times before, in burnt out new recruits, overworked logistics staff.
-Bosnian Refugees-
"My truck is fine; I walked here."
Part of why he liked Officer Lindstrom in the first place was that she wasn't the nosey type. That first night they had slept together, he had woken her as he jumped out of bed at half past two. She knew without having to be told that he had troubles, and that those troubles were not going to be talked about. He would extend the courtesy, and not ask what would possess her to walk to a greasy spoon nearly four clicks from her house in the middle of the night.
"It's a nice night for it." He sipped the tall glass of ice water that had been waiting for him. Irene knew that had given up coffee when he had given up Army. "You order yet?"
"No, I was waiting for you."
"I appreciate it, course, you didn't have to."
"I know." She waved over at the waitress behind the counter. "You know what you want?"
It was a rhetorical question. He always ordered the same thing. Their waitress, Kathleen, took their orders and refilled Irene's coffee.
They made small talk as they waited for their chow, chatting about meaningless stuff, baseball, station-house politics. As they talked Forest couldn't help but see himself as he looked at her, and that was not a good thing.
"So, how's the job?" He figured that it was work that was bothering her. The question would give her the chance to talk about it if she wanted, but it was also vague enough to be deflected if she didn't.
Irene sighed and dropped her head in her hands. She was dressed in a bulky RPD pullover sweater and her hair was uncombed. The long scar on her left cheek that she normally covered with makeup was a dull pink stripe on her pale skin. She looked twenty four going on fifty.
"Ugh," She ran both hands through her hair. "Work's been weird lately."
Forest nodded, she was going to talk.
"Joe and I responded to a missing person's report on the sixteenth; it seemed pretty straightforward"
He leaned back as his girlfriend spent the next fifteen minutes going over a very peculiar sequence of events. A missing person's case out in the hills that ended with three mutilated corpses, killed in a way that had baffled an experienced Medical Examiner to the point where he had difficulty even estimating the time of death. At the moment all three bodies were still labelled as suspicious deaths pending further examination. Four days later, a single vehicle rollover happened within spitting distance from where the missing bodies were found. The driver was a no show but they found a ditch covered in blood that matched the blood taken from inside the car. They brought up a K9 unit to trace the scene, but all the dog did was piss on itself and play dead. They called in the other K9 team and the dog got spooked as well; its handler ended up with a decent sized bite on his hand as he tried to pull the mutt out of its kennel.
"Shoot, I've seen those dogs work. That one German Sheppard with the black muzzle is vicious as hell."
Kathleen brought over their food. Biscuits, sausages and country gravy for himself, toast and scrambled eggs for Irene. Forest attacked his plate with a haste common to most military men, while Irene picked at her meal as she continued on with her story.
"Joe's been keeping tabs on the Connor case even though Aaron Silverman is investigating. Apparently Geezer is getting all sorts of screwed readings with his tissue samples, he can't even get a blood type on some of the fluids collected on the oldest Connor. He's got a bunch of stuff over at the state crime lab in Portland, and they're having trouble with it, too."
Irene paused and nibbled the corner off a piece of toast.
"Another weird thing is the wallet we recovered at the eleven twenty-four. It's full of ID, belonging to some Russian professor living in New York on a work Visa. We tried to get a hold of the guy. There was no answer at his place, so we tracked down his work. They told us he's been at the company offices in Geneva for two months."
"What company does he work for?" Forest asked with a mouthful of food.
"Umbrella Pharmaceuticals," she answered. "They say he's been in Europe for two months, but we found a receipt for the Tree Top Hotel in his wallet, dated last month."
"That place in Latham?"
"Yeah, it's near the place that serves those fries everyone talks about." She took another bite of her toast. "So we know that he's been in the area."
"Or at least his wallet has been."
Irene nodded, her mood seemed to be improving. Forest wasn't sure if it was the chow, the coffee, or the talking that was doing it, though.
"We'll know tomorrow. I'm calling Umbrella's office in Geneva. God, I hope they speak English."
"Did you get an ID on the driver of that rollover?" Forest couldn't help but chuckle to himself. The military had been his one and only dream as a kid, but now look at him, discussing cases with his cop girlfriend. Life was full of surprises.
"The car was stolen that evening. We've got prints, but nothing came back on record. We found a pack of Canadian cigarettes in the car though, and we faxed the prints over to the RCMP so they can check their files for us. It's a long shot, but who knows."
"You're right Reen, it is a peculiar case." he said.
"Yeah, you guys should be the ones handling it, not Silverman. Aaron's a good cop, but he's narrow minded. He sees the Connor deaths as an animal attack, and the rollover as an unrelated accident. I don't know what he makes of the blood and the wallet. He's only on the Connor case. The rollover is still our file.
"But you figure that they're related? " Forest asked.
Irene nodded.
"Yeah I do, and so does Joe. Another strange thing is that we're pretty certain that there was only one occupant in the vehicle, but that clearing where we found the blood was covered in shoeprints. From at least four different pairs of shoes."
Forest paused mid-chew and frowned at her.
"Four people?" he asked.
"Yup,"
"And there was only one blood sample?"
"Yup,"
"That's downright contrary,"
"I know. Oh yeah, two more people went missing over the weekend, some high school kids who went swimming in Victory Lake."
"I heard about that one, Captain Marini figures that we'll end up taking over that file. You suppose it's related to that other stuff?"
Irene nodded again and sipped her coffee. "It's in the same area of the others, it only makes sense."
Forest agreed. The more he heard, the more certain he was that this was a case for the STARS. It would more than likely be Bravo Team that would handle it. STARS Alpha were still busy, code six, as Irene would say, assisting a back country Sherriff's department with a standoff against some whacked-out doomsday cult holed up in a bunker.
"Well, we're dog-eared to take over that missing person's case with the two teenagers. I'll let Enrico know what you figure, but knowing him, he's miles ahead of us. That fella's got horse-sense with that sort of thing."
"Thanks, I'd appreciate it." She poked at her eggs. She was the slowest goddamn eater he had ever met. "You guys are done up in Lane county?"
"Yep, yesterday."
"You found that last body?"
Yes, they had; as a matter of fact it had been Edward Dewey and himself who had pulled out Kristy DeWitt's corpse. After two and a half weeks underwater she couldn't be recognised as anything remotely human. What a sick joke it was that they had been given her graduation photo as a reference. There was no way that the jellied grey mess that they had fished up could have once been that pretty girl, smiling brightly in her gown and mortarboard.
As they struggled to zip her into a body bag her abdomen had deflated, sending forth a spray of decomposed gasses. Forest had been raised on a pig farm; he had once stood next to a dozen bodies piled into a mass grave. Nothing compared to the ungodly stench that poor girl gave off, "A stink that would choke a maggot off a meat wagon," his Grand-Dad would have said.
He gazed at his plate. Biscuits and gravy had been his favourite meal since childhood, but it dawned on him that the skin on Kristy DeWitt's face had the same colour and consistency as the thick clump of white gravy, sausage and bread crumbs.
Forest stopped chewing. He could smell the girl's rotten guts again, though it was that mass grave in Srebrenica that he was seeing, twelve pairs of dead eyes staring up at him.
He felt his gorge rise and struggled to swallow what was surely to be his last bite of breakfast. It slowly, painfully scraped down his throat and he quickly washed it down with a big swig of water. He dropped his cutlery, tossed a napkin onto his plate, and pushed it away. He was likely finished with biscuts and gravy for a while to come.
"Yeah, me and Ed Dewey found it." Was he imagining the strangled sound to his voice?
-You're a yellow son of a bitch, you know that? No better than that pilot, Vickers, on Alpha team-
"That's good." Irene answered, and then thankfully dropped the subject.
He could still smell Kristy DeWitt wafting over from his breakfast plate. Hopefully the waitress would take it away soon.
Forest knew that he needed to get used to dead bodies if he was going to make it as a cop. There was a good chance that he would be pulling two more out of Victory Lake this week. He swallowed back his gorge again; he needed to get back into school, learn a trade or something. Plumbers and electricians made good money. Anything would be better than what he was doing for a living right now.
He forced his mind onto another subject, and settled on watching Irene as she daintily ate her breakfast. She wasn't a small woman by any means, but she moved with the grace of a whitetail deer. His folks would like her. She had been raised on a farm. She was hard working, God fearing; he had no doubt that they would overlook the fact that she was a Northerner.
"So I hear that y'all kicked the tar out the Raccoon Fire Department on Saturday." he said.
She glanced at him, and a devilish spark lit in her eyes.
"Yes we did." She leaned forward, beaming. "It was glorious!"
Forest chuckled and listened intently as his cop girlfriend laughed and explained in great detail the ass-kicking that she and her team had delivered to their rivals at the RFD.
He took in her features as she aped the hangdog expressions of the defeated firefighters. How her nose and eyes crinkled when she smiled. How that pink stripe on her cheek blended with her flushed and laughing face. How could he have thought she looked like an old woman? Hell, right now Irene could have passed for a giddy teenage girl.
Jesus he felt old, sitting across from her.
Kathleen came, bussed his plate and dropped off their bills. Forest scooped up both before she could grab hers. Irene had clearly had a rough couple of weeks at work and was torn up about something. Buying breakfast was the least he could do for her.
Twenty minutes later, they were standing outside in the early morning sunshine, struggling to hear each other over the rumbling diesel engines He had offered to give her a ride home, but she insisted on walking. Whatever suited her.
"Thanks for breakfast. I'll give you a call sometime." She bent forward and pecked him on the cheek; her lips tickled his whiskers.
Forest scratched the back of his neck and watched her walk away, backlit by the rising sun. He may have been unhappy with how his life had turned out, but he was grateful that he had met Irene. There weren't many women out there as fine as she was.
He took another look. The wind was blowing her hair back, and the angle of the sun was doing nice things for her curves.
Officer Irene Lindstrom may not have been the prettiest thing he had ever seen.
-But she's pretty damn close-
Front Page Raccoon Herald June 26 1998
Search for missing youths ends in tragedy
Ben Bertolucci
The four day search for missing teens Jody Albrecht (17) and Erin Hawthorne (17) both of Raccoon City came to an unfortunate end late yesterday evening as both bodies were discovered near an abandoned granite quarry four miles Northwest of Victory Lake.
A spokesman for the Raccoon Police Department stated that the search, headed by the RPD's Special Tactics and Rescue Service was shifted to the quarry site following a tip called in…
Author's Note. Holy crap! I wrote a chapter about a canon character! Hopefully all seven Forest Speyer fans out there approve.
