His expression turned stern as he leaned forward in his chair, groaning beneath his weight.
“I don’t want you working on anything else, Detective. This is your primary focus until we know what happened. I want you to eat, drink, shit, and piss this case, understand? Get us a new lead on this thing and I’ll provide whatever resources you need to see the investigation through.”
His jaw set as he summed me up once more: “Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes sir,” I smiled confidently.
“Very good,” my superior replied, still unsure what to do with my change in demeanor. “Now that you grasp what is expected of you … leave my sight and get your ass to Tucson immediately.”
I rose, shaking his hand, and closed the door behind myself. I passed by my new office; I hadn’t even taken the time to get settled into the room, electing to go straight for my Sergeant. All I’d done is placed my box of belongings on the edge of the desk…
Taking the moment to pause, I stroked my fingertips along the edge of the desk, glancing around the small room. It lacked a view, or art, or anything that made it anything less than a small cog in the machinery that ran this precinct… but it was mine.
It was mine for right now, at least.
There was no telling what was going to happen with this case. The Lieutenant had put me on a dead end and he knew it. I was going to be the scapegoat to compartmentalize the damage when the department failed to find those girls. It was a way of quietly shoving me out of the way.
If I even found them, it would just make him look that much better for putting the new girl on the case.
Damn you, Sergeant, I groaned to myself. You and your stupid fucking leg…
Tucson had been tread and retread time and time again. There wasn’t anything new that was going to turn up there. It was a dead end… but it was as good a place as any to start.
I strolled down the stairs and out the front door of the precinct, the case folder tightly under my arm. Pulling out a pair of sunglasses in the hot Phoenix sun, I felt the slight breeze in the air. The wind flowed over me, caressing my skin – the very elements comforting me, pushing me onward.
The drive was only three hours even after fighting a few miles of morning traffic. I suspected that I wasn’t going to be staying in Tucson, so I saw fit to appease my Lieutenant while the window of opportunity was available. I phoned him moment that I arrived in the city.
“Glad to hear you can follow basic orders,” he snarled in response. “Where exactly are you starting your investigation?”
“I need to pour over these case files,” I replied truthfully. “Familiarize myself with the inner workings of this thing. Put some fresh eyes on it. If I’m going to dig something up, it’ll probably have to be from there.”
“A boring answer, but the right one,” he grumbled. “Take a day and get the lay of the land. Study that shit like your life depends on it. Figure it out from there. Oh, and Detective?”
He sneered out the title, as always. Good to know that he still questioned my capabilities. “Contact me when you’ve actually got something, and not a fucking second sooner.”
With that, he hung up loudly.
I had parked outside a small diner to make the call, and I gazed over at the case file on the passenger seat. If I was going to find these girls, the answer was going to be in that folder… and I sensed that the path forward was already clear.
For late morning, the diner was only half full. This suited me just fine, and I requested a big table in the corner. While the waitress returned with my coffee, I was already up to my ass in paperwork. The case file had plenty of dirt on the Devil’s Dragons MC, and even more on Hunter. The club had arrived in town a few days after the girls went missing and started asking questions… the right questions.
For their efforts, they wound up with a great, big target slapped on their backs. Police attention was the last thing those guys wanted, but they collectively became prime suspect number one for several days. After all, they had a well deserved reputation. Half of the files scattered on this table came from the Devil’s Dragons. Arrests, statements, stakeouts, and a thick manilla folder full of details about the raid on their strip club base of operations eight years ago.
That brought back some memories…
I turned the page, shaken as I saw the pictures of the aftermath. Men lay in pools of blood, and the club was absolutely riddled with bullets. It seemed like they’d pulled every single file related to the Dragons during this investigation. The police raid on their former base in Phoenix had definitely raised some eyebrows in the Tucson jurisdiction. Half the club was killed in the shootout, and most of the others were rotting away in a prison just outside Florence. From the looks of things, less than half a dozen men avoided being charged, and they’d spent the last handful of years bolstering their numbers out of a new clubhouse in El Paso…