Chapter 21

Lieutenant Blanchard hated crime scenes. He puckered his lips at the sour smell of vomit and piss rising from the sidewalk. Most of it radiated from beneath the crowd that had gathered along the street. Untold numbers of prying eyes wanted to see what was responsible for dragging almost every cop in the city away from the shrieking electrifying madness that was Reynolds Power Plant to the humble old stoop of Midtown's Precinct 336.

Blanchard slapped up the slick yellow caution tape strung across the street. It spanned from corner to corner, restricting access to the entire block. This was the third time they had to push the line back to keep the mob from carrying away the dead like a mosh pit of fevered excitement. The derelicts, news crews, and common folk wouldn't stop swarming at the thought of an inner city conspiracy involving Reynolds and the Midtown Police Department.

Everyone and their extended families wanted a ticket to see the red and blue circus that had come to town. Everywhere Blanchard looked, blue and white checkered hats danced around the street, tripping over their shoes in a skit worthy of a crate full of rotten tomatoes. This big top of a crime scene was two times too small for the parade of clowns running back and forth with no purpose other than to propagate confusion. And given they were still three blocks away from the main spotlight, it was a testament to the carnage to come.

Not that Blanchard actually knew what he was walking into. After the first Code Black rippled across the dispatch frequency, every officer on scene went radio silent. Considering a Code Black was the call sign for an attack on the home front, it was probably a political nightmare. The equivalent of calling the red telephone in the president's office. You'd think at least one blue boot with some semblance of an update would have been waiting for him to arrive. A transport vehicle would have been even better. Lieutenant Blanchard huffed and puffed down the street toward the collection of cruisers forming a protective barrier in front of the police station.

Red nosed and sweating off the press conference make up, he squeezed through the maze of tires and hubcaps into the latest inner circle of devastation Midtown had to offer. It was surprisingly quite. Hushed like the voices on the radio. Only a few cops lingered near the edge of the police cruisers. A no man's land spread between them and the second line of caution tape nearby.

Up ahead, a covered body lay at the bottom of the stairs directly below the front entrance to the police station. Dropped right on his fucking door step. It painted an ugly picture, but it wasn't unheard of. Loads of community terrorists and wackos brought war to the front door. It wasn't like there were bodies hanging from the power lines like Reynolds. So what was all the fuss about?

Now as wet and tired as he was insulted, Lieutenant Blanchard stormed up to the fluttering yellow tape. Not a hand lifted it for him. Not even in his dress blues surrounded by lesser checkered hats. Was every badge in this city made of tin? Blanchard swiped away the flimsy plastic. It splashed him in the face with rain droplets, stirring a flinch and deepening the tomato like quality of his face.

Three officers stood a respectable distance from the body. One of them was a sergeant judging from the stripes on his shoulders. He wore a cowl of blood around his neck and the back of his uniform was charred. Only one sergeant in the whole precinct amounted to that much trouble.

"Lipton!" Blanchard shouted. He stomped through the puddles towards the huddle. The two officers flanking the sergeant quieted as the lieutenant approached. Lipton turned around, saw Blanchard, and put on a scowl worthy of a write up. Blanchard would have considered the notion, but he was too soggy for anymore paperwork. The ink wouldn't stick in this slippery fiasco of a night anyway.

"What the hell happened?" Blanchard demanded, keeping his statement vague enough to hide his incompetence. "I leave you in charge for five minutes and the whole fucking city explodes."

"You didn't leave me in charge," Lipton corrected. "You just left." His tone was oddly cool for such scolding words. Probably because it was a fact and not a matter of opinion. The two officers behind the sergeant sneered at the rebuff like vengeful school children. Playing favorites wasn't just for politicians. Had the whole precinct gone mad? Was there no respect for the hierarchy anymore?

"You said you had everything under control," Blanchard redirected, brushing aside the quip before anyone noticed it wasn't a baseless taunt. Not that he had spoken to the sergeant since slipping out of the door the moment electrified shit hit the super powered turbine fan. The officer managing the outer perimeter had simply mentioned that Lipton assumed incident command.

That was the single most important fact Blanchard learned since arriving on scene because that one fact shed him of all responsibility of the incident up until this point. Sergeant Lipton bristled at the claim, but Blanchard ignored him. With an established scapegoat, he didn't have anything to worry about except how quickly he could leave. Cleaning up this mess shouldn't be too hard given it was a single body. Blanchard walked over to the sidewalk and looked down at the water logged sheet. A second had been placed over it because the first was a solid cherry red. The edges were starting to turn pink.

"So who's the stiff?" Blanchard grunted with a verbal tap on the nearest boot.

The two officers were silent now. Stiff as xatu. No doubt regretting their earlier slight now that they knew he had the authority to do more than stoop down to their petty level. Lipton slowly curled his hands into fists at his sides. It must have been from the cool stormy draft, but it looked like smoke curled off of his shoulders. Maybe he was still smoldering from whatever burned him earlier.

"That…was Annie Cofield," Lipton answered, slowly pressing each word through a clenched set of sharpened canines.

Blanchard laughed. It was a short dismissive clap of disbelief. He flicked an eye at Lipton. "Don't shit with me," he chuckled. Annie Cofield was the one person it couldn't be. She was detained. On lock down. Wrapped up in so much red tape with all of this media madness that she'd stay preserved till next Christmas.

Lipton said nothing, and the fact that he didn't explode with volcanic ferocity meant that he was serious. Dead serious. Lieutenant Blanchard looked down at the sheet again. The body behind it was small, petite, feminine. It was a woman and the Code Black made her an MPD officer. One brazen enough to make the precinct her personal tombstone. Only one line of officers bred such outlandish entitlement: The Cofields. And now, he had one dead at his gates.

It had to be a mistake. Blanchard reached down and tore away the sheets. He had to see for himself. Lipton pounced on the lieutenant and threw him off to the side. Blanchard spun heavily to the ground as one of the attending officers rushed in and pulled the sheets back into place.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Lipton yelled, fingers curled and crooked with another fury swipe at the ready.

"She's dead," Blanchard stuttered, eyes bulging with the image of the corpse. "She's really dead." Now, he understood why this crime scene was so taboo. Annie Cofield was dead.

"Annie is just the beginning," Lipton exclaimed, settling his rage out of respect for the dead. The pale stiff hands they placed on his shoulders cooled his blood. "There's even more inside."

"You don't get it, do you?" Blanchard suddenly snapped, scrambling to his feet. "It doesn't matter how many bodies there are." He jabbed a meaty finger at the ghost haunting his once beautiful visions of the future. "That one will be the end of us!"

The heat of Lipton's fury evaporated the ghostly hands on his shoulders. He lunged forward only to be caught by the living and yanked back into place. The two officers from before struggled to hold him back. Unaware of the immediate threat to his life, Blanchard turned away, eyes dashing back and forth in search of the pieces of his future he could still salvage.

"We've got to get rid of it," he whispered, "before he gets here." Removing the body from the scene would weaken the impact of discovery. Maybe even save them all from a similar fate.

A short burst of static on the radio interrupted his schemes. It scratched out a Code Blue. A call sign even more foreboding than the first. The sound of squealing tires followed. It came from the far end of the street as a solid black SUV turned down the road. It sped toward the crime scene, blue lights flashing behind the tint of bullet proof glass. Blanchard whirled around to face the rapidly approaching vehicle.

"He's here," the lieutenant gasped, stepping backwards to bump into Lipton. "It's too late."

He whirled around and stabbed the sergeant's chest. "Don't think for a second that I'm going to take the blame for this," he threatened. "This is your fault!"

Lipton shrugged off his escorts. Once he was free, Blanchard grabbed him by the vest and yanked him closer. "Say one word and I'll make sure your running meters for the rest of your life. Do you understand me?!"

A five knuckled salute set the lieutenant on his ass again. Meanwhile, the SUV screamed down the block towards the crime scene. Water arched from its spinning tires. The engine roared with a flush of gasoline, thrusting the battering ram attached to the grill forward. Move or be moved, it promised. The nearest checkered hat jumped inside an open cruiser and pulled it out of the barricade without pausing to close the door.

The black bullet sped through the checkered line up and squealed to a stop outside of the caution tape. The rear passenger door flung open before the vehicle even settled, slinging rain from its edges. Everything suddenly quieted. Respect was warranted when one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse appeared. Not a soul moved as a gnarled wrinkled hand grabbed the door frame from the inside.

A blue and white checkered hat emerged from the shadows of the vehicle and rode above the line of the open door with the ease of a sharpedo fin. The style resembled that of a lost generation. One forged in a golden age of police work when a single half inch stripe of checkboard on a dark blue black brimmed hat was enough to catch a man in place better than a line of barbed wire. Two tightly laced boots dropped down onto the asphalt. Cracked and scuffed at the tips, they wouldn't have wavered even if they dropped on top of a landmine.

The Midtown Police Commissioner may have spent the last two decades of his life in an office, but that didn't stop him from wearing a field man's uniform. His trousers were a dark navy blue. Fatigued from the usual cobalt from too many hard chases, late night raids, and long stakeouts. They puffed up lightly around the tops of his boots where years of methodical tucking permanently wrinkled the fabric.

The color of the commissioner's pants matched the same fatigue that darkened his long sleeved jacket. A single silver buckle as flat as a bar of iron fastened the uniform together. No respectable soldier walked around with his shirt tail hanging out. A single gold badge the color of a wedding ring dropped in the trenches decorated his chest. A constellation of blunt unpolished stars lined his shoulders. The edges were almost as hard as his frown.

A spearow squalled from its perch on the commissioner's shoulder. It shook its feathers against the rain and held its beak open in a perpetual screech worthy of the scar that clouded its right eye. Baron, the spearow, didn't prune his feathers. One or two were missing. The ends were dull. Chipped and scuffed better than a Spartan's shield. The commissioner held a matching spear with his gaze. He lowered it onto the scene before him. Crows' feet split the stony crags of his usual animosity with a cold hard hatred.

"Where is she?" Commissioner Arthur Cornelius Cofield boomed. "Where is my granddaughter?"

He looked through the caution tape towards the police station. Only a handful of men remained, too frozen in terror to scatter at the sound of his voice. They stood around a white sheet on the sidewalk. Baron shrieked again, squeezing his talons into the commissioner's shoulder to spur him forward. The sound of his steel tipped boots struck the ground with the deafening clang of a hammer on metal.

A nearly invisible cut from the spearow's wings cleaved the yellow caution tape in half. The ends fluttered to the ground, whirling in the wake of a one man missile headed straight for his own basecamp. Blanchard ran up to salvage what was left of his career. A broken nose might stir a sense of sympathy and comradery, but the commissioner marched past the lieutenant without a shred of recognition, forcing Blanchard to reel away or be steam rolled.

Further on, the two attending officers quickly retreated to the edge of the crime scene just beyond the yellow line where the shadow of the emergency lights hid their trembling. Lipton squared his shoulders and prepared himself for the blow that was to come. Nothing he said or did would change the fact that Annie Cofield was dead, he was her superior, and Arthur Cornelius Cofield didn't believe in coincidences.

The commissioner drew up beside the sergeant with the pressure of a loaded gun, eyes cast down at the sheet covering his one and only grandchild. The rain had plastered the fabric around the contours of her body, preserving the childlike lines of her face with doll like smoothness. The rain dripped off of the city around them like a war drumroll, pausing in silence for each one of their lost souls. It echoed across the battlefield with a hollow beat, making the commissioner's next whisper as loud as a cannon.

"Where is he?" Cofield demanded. "Where is the son of a bitch that butchered my grandbaby?"

Lieutenant Blanchard wasn't the religious type, but he crossed himself anyway before stepping closer. Offering up semi-hopeful news was still better than bad news. "We're still looking," he squeaked, swallowing the bile rising in his throat, "but he couldn't have gotten far. We'll find him."

The commissioner whirled around with a gust. It tossed the lieutenant onto his back with a splash. "You wretched pathetic sniveling sad excuse of a dog!" Cofield bellowed.

Blanchard scuttled backwards in a terrified gasp as the spearow stretched his wings again.

"I wasn't talking to you!" The commissioner then spun upon the sergeant, aiming the question at the center of Lipton's forehead. Having gazed down this barrel once before, Lipton knew better than to try and spare his life with a lie. He also owed it to Annie to speak the truth.

"He got away," Lipton explained, watching the trigger tighten. "I couldn't stop him."

The war drum paused then began again.

"Turn around," the commissioner suddenly ordered.

Lipton obeyed and felt the spear of judgment press into his back. It moved from his blackened uniform to the stiches in the back of his head and the blood dripping from his knuckles. Another pause.

"On your knees."

Lipton closed his eyes and shakily exhaled. Executions weren't just for gangsters, but the shot never came. At some point while his back was turned, the commissioner decided to redirect his ire at the whelp wetting himself in the puddles at their feet.

"Stop crawling in the mud like a wild pokemon!" Cofield yelled, kicking Blanchard into motion. "You said you'd find the bastard so go find him!"

Lieutenant Blanchard scrambled to his feet and ran for the safety of the line. The commissioner then swung his spear onto the statues surrounding them. "That means you too!" he thundered. Baron shrieked and lashed out a burst of air that hastened the company's retreat. Lipton made a move to follow, but the backbone of a different order set him straight again.

"Not you," the commissioner growled. His voice was rough like water logged gravel. "You stay."

Sergeant Lipton slowly rocked back onto his heels as the sound of scuffing boots faded. Soon all was silent again. There were no onlookers, eaves droppers, or meddling eyes now. No witnesses to what would happen next. Commissioner Cofield slowly stepped up onto the sidewalk again. He stared down at the red and white sheets bleeding together. He stood there awhile. Long enough to digest the facts he knew and come to a possible conclusion.

"Was it him?" Cofield asked, keeping his back to the sergeant. "The one she kept trying to help?"

It was an irony too bitter to speak. Lipton watched as the commissioner grew a little smaller then. Heavier, as he packed it away inside. It was the only way he knew how to mourn. He'd seen too many dead bodies to be able to cry over one of them himself.

"I tried to break her of that habit," Cofield suddenly confessed, trying to sympathizing with the only person who understood his troublesome granddaughter as much as he did. "But I couldn't do it. No matter how cruel or cold I was, she wouldn't stop believing in the good in people. She thought if she helped them, she could save them."

The commissioner dug his nails into his palms, drawing blood. "And look what it fucking got her." Lips high and teeth tight, he sheared the words between his teeth.

"I thought if she could survive me, she could survive anything, including this hell hole."

Maybe if he had been more of a friend to her than a superior, this might not have happened, but that wasn't the Cofield way. "She was supposed to bring life back to this precinct. Start the revolution that would clean up the streets and change this city. Usher in a new era…"

And now that Annie was dead, so was the dream. The hope of a better life snuffed out in the scum of Midtown. If her passion wasn't strong enough to burn through the muck, nothing would. Sergeant Lipton didn't know how to respond. He didn't know what it felt like to lose an entire family. To stare down at a legacy of peace keepers that ended in blood. But one didn't command legions of men into a never ending street war by being sentimental.

Commissioner Cofield glanced to the side and spotted the last of the Cofield family firearms in the gutter. Baron hopped down his arm and landed on the ground beside it. The spearow hooked a talon around the trigger cage and flapped back up to his trainer's outreached arm. Commissioner Cofield returned Baron to his perch and took the weapon in his hand, recognizing the handle immediately.

"She fired off a shot," Lipton stated, eyeing the weapon. It was the only consolation he could offer.

"Of course she did," Cofield snapped with a prideful break of his earlier lamentations.

He didn't teach his foolhardy granddaughter to shot the wings off of a yanma 30 meters out for nothing. That bullet was still out there, slowly worming its way deeper into the flesh of the poor bastard who thought he was going to live just because he got away. Commissioner Cofield clutched the weapon in his hand and turned around. He walked up to the sergeant and stopped in front of him, face to face. The time for grieving was over.

"You owe this family in blood," Commissioner Cofield announced, and the only reason Lipton hadn't paid for it with his life was because his son and granddaughter had died trying to protect it. Now, it was time to pay up. "So you find that murdering bastard before Blanchard's pissant task force does and you kill him."

Cofield slapped the lead lined promise into the sergeant's hand.

"The old fashion way."