The Subtle Art of Brutality

The arson captain probably hopes Volksman winds up meandering around some burnt building and steps on a fire-weakened floorboard and takes the Grade-A dirt with him on his fall down.

Three obvious arsons last night. Three different MO’s. Derne’s place had an attached garage whose back door was unlocked. It was opened and left that way. Neither Derne nor his wife was assaulted. Their possessions were rifled through. It’s hard to tell what is missing and what was incinerated now.

While three in one night is a rarity in these parts, the different MO’s will be the monkey wrench in the works. Clevenger told Riggens about the Delilah Boothe connection. Riggens is a lightweight at Bomb and Arson, Volksman is an egomaniacal cocksucker. The third investigator, Jennifer Rudd, I don’t know.

Elam Derne suffered smoke inhalation while trying to pull his wife from the blaze. He also did a number on his back. I guess his wife was heavy. Cancer hadn’t had time to whittle her down yet. He’s in traction, on muscle relaxers and pain meds.

In the hospital he cradles his head. Nurses said if he keeps sobbing the way he is, they might just medicate him. “Just a little something to calm him down so he can sleep.” I asked if there was anything you couldn’t get doped up for nowadays. One mumbled, Being an asshole.

The others didn’t answer.

Derne’s not much help. What he does say is all sobs; the vowels losing their identities in his anguish. Crying and consonants, when that’s all you speak, are not good storytellers. My patience more than anything drives me from his room. He says something. I turn around.

He holds a faded picture of his wife, looks like it was removed from his wallet. He clears his throat and whispers, “Darla’s house burnt down.”

I already know; called Clevenger when I found about Derne. Clevenger checked in on it. Fire number three.

Busy night for the demons that feed off of lives burning. I leave the hospital. I need to be in Three Mile High.

27

A note on me: cops, like firemen and EMS, are always looking for good calls.

What might be the best call of your life might be the worst headache of your supervisor’s life. That just might be that kind of outlook that got me in trouble so much. I handled things old school while the rest of the law enforcement community steered away from that playground of fists and intimidation and headed towards the nicer, gentler new school.

There was a day when tuning up some asshole was the correct way to fix the problem. Nowadays cops fear scrutiny just a tad less than they fear death. Actual death. They fear scrutiny with good cause, to be sure, but still. The best way to teach a child abuser to stop abusing is not counseling. It is not therapy. It is a mouth full of broken teeth, and arms that when the bones heal cannot produce the force necessary to hit or burn another child. The gift that keeps on giving. That is how I sleep at night.

So, the good calls, they just pop up. They pop up five minutes ’til the shift is over. They pop up while you’re taking a simple burglary report and you do everything you can to rush the report without making the burglary victim feel like he is what he is: the lowest priority ever.

I had a good call one night. Maybe it was the last good call for me. Because it was also my supervisor’s worst nightmare, and she, in turn, made it mine. That nightmare had resounding effects. Made little ripples in the water of my life. Those ripples still lap at the shores today.

Jefferson Stoke and his boy Thomas popped up while Clevenger and I were two blocks away, interviewing a witness about a completely separate case. The mom called in, said her soon-to-be ex-husband Jefferson was rough-handling his boy and she wanted it stopped. I never pass up an opportunity to become a fearful memory in the mind of a man big enough to hurt a child.

Even though we were homicide detectives, we snatched up the call.

Any real cop will say this matter-of-factly: what is reported to dispatch and what you actually find can sometimes be two hugely different things. Case in point: Jefferson Stoke.

Two months prior to that night, Jennifer Stoke found her bank account drained into two separate funds: her husband’s private alcohol reserve, and her husband’s private erotic dancing reserve. When she confronted him about it she found out two interesting facts about her husband: he had lost his job five months previously for threatening to kill his boss with a shotgun, and he had been lying to her about going to work while actually going to strip clubs and spending their savings, their investments and her inheritance from her recently deceased mother.

Don’t ask me how these shenanigans go on for almost half a year undetected. But when she did find out, Mrs. Stoke decided to go back to her maiden name. Jennifer screamed divorce, took their son Thomas, moved in with her sister. Jefferson got to see the boy here and there while squatting in their almost-foreclosed on home.

Fast forward to the good call night. The worst headache of my supervisor’s life night. Jennifer and Thomas go to their former home and visit Jefferson. Clevenger and I are a few blocks away, Jennifer calls 911 and says Jefferson is being aggressive with his six-year-old. We take it.

Jennifer meets us on the lawn, disheveled, hair a mess, her face the kind of red that comes with a good backhand, crying. Something about Jefferson inside beating up the boy. Something about him drinking, hating his life, blah blah blah.

I mount the steps. The screen door has been torn from its hinges. Hole in the drywall. The room at dusk is lit only by the cockeyed light from an overturned table lamp; the conical shade now on its side and pressing an oval of light against the wall horizontally.

The place smells of a broken home, torn in two by lies. Even now, I can still fill my nostrils with the acrid, stale air of that house. It makes me snarl and grit my teeth. I can hear the whimperings. Even before I see Jefferson Stoke I can hear him adjust his one-handed grip on the shotgun. The weight is getting to him; he has to support the pump action weapon with his strong arm only because in his off-hand he holds his boy still.

Better to keep the muzzle pointed at his head that way.

“One more step and I’ll fucking do it, I swear,” he says, the voice of a man who is desperately searching inside for the balls to end this thing with bloodshed. Suicides come in two categories: the ones who think they want it but are stilling working up to do it, and the ones who have already found their peace with it.

“I can rack rounds in this gun faster than you can regret showing up here,” he says, looking me in the eye. “This doesn’t involve you; it’s my damn family, and I will do what’s best. To all of us.”

Not for all of us. To all of us.

The hippies got it wrong: peace does not solve things. It clears the path to do what apprehension was formerly holding at bay. Reference the suicide typologies. Stoke was not really ready to kill his boy yet, but he was running down that road faster than I could keep up.