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“Where’s your hat?”
My partner’s greeting is drowned out by high-pitched and yet hoarse barking from the emotional support animal who inhabits the top of her desk like a pointy-eared gremlin. Obigor the little Brussels griffon had ginger fur once, but now he is nearly entirely white around his little face. Obigor doesn’t see well, doesn’t hear basically at all, but he loves Tessie more fiercely than any creature on the planet.
Tessie has worked with me for six months. She holds down the office while I go out and look at things. She does the paperwork, I do the grunt work. She used to go out in the field but got benched after being shot after less than a year on the job by some asshole who didn’t want to pay a speeding ticket. She walks with a cane, which she uses to hit people if she catches them feeling sorry for her.
She’s very pretty, with caramel skin and the cutest freckles that dot the bridge of her nose, dark eyes, and curling dark hair. She might be the smartest person I’ve ever met. She can do more from behind a desk in one hour than some people can do in weeks in the field.
“No festive headgear allowed at crime scenes,” I tell her. “Why are you still here? You should have been at home in bed hours ago.”
“I don’t sleep,” she says. What she doesn’t say is she doesn’t sleep because she’s always in pain. She refuses to take painkillers besides weed, the scent of which I pretend does not perpetually permeate my office.
“We’ve got another one,” I tell her. “This one looks like a…”
Tessie glances toward our open office door. I share my office with her, which is fine because I’m barely ever here. So really, it’s her office.
I’ve been told to tone down my colorful similes. There’s nobody here to hear them, aside from the night shift, but the night shift rarely undergoes the formality of actually appearing at the 89th. They’re around somehow without ever being present.
“Another one of them mutilated?” She guesses correctly.
“Yes,” I say. Understatement is best.
She pulls out a red file. Everything is stored on computers, of course, but Tessie likes having special case files on paper. No matter how much they push us to digitize, a lot of us are still addicted to paper. Can’t hack a pen.
“Digital pictures are on the computer,” she tells me. “Print them out if you want. Wouldn’t recommend it. From what I saw, it’s a ‘cannot be unseen’ sort of situation. While you were interviewing the witness, we had some basic stats come through about the victim. Male, somewhere between thirty and fifty. Hard to tell when someone is, er,openthat way. It’s starting to look like a serial killer. If this keeps up, the FBI will be all over it. They love serial killers.”
I stare at her and snap my fingers. “That’s right! They will be all over this pretty soon. Oh. Good. They can deal with the interviews. And the bodies.”
“The tabloids are going to be full of it again. People are getting scared,” Tessie sighs.
“People are always scared.”
It’s not that I’m indifferent, it’s that I’ve seen too much in my time on the force to expect anybody to feel anything other than fear, generally speaking. The world is a much more fucked up place than most people realize. The proper response to waking up each morning is probably five solid minutes of good solid screaming before attacking the day.
“Try and keep it out of Randy Carrot’s hands, if you can. This department is still leaking like a fucking sieve,” I tell Tessie.
Randy Carrot is not the woman’s real name. Her real name is Ramona Carrick. The misnomer is immature, unprofessional, and prime cop humor. One step up from writing her number in the john and noting it is for a good time.
Someone in the force is already having a good time on her payroll. Things that should be kept quiet keep showing up in the tabloid she writes for. Still, that’s another problem that isn’t strictly mine to deal with, so I won’t be dealing with it. That’s the Chief’s department. Nobody survives this job without learning to delegate and compartmentalize.
“I’m not on speaking terms with Ms Carrick,” Tessie says, taking her curly hair down, and then putting it up again, in the way she does when she’s agitated.
“Alright, good. I’m going to step outside for a second. Get some fresh air. Try to clear my head.”
“Don’t forget your lighter,” Tessie grins.
“Aw, shuddup.” I smile back.
I quit smoking three years ago, and I’m very proud of that fact. Now I only smoke socially, and late at night, and sometimes during the day, and occasionally when I’m alone. I step out the back of the station with one of those blessed cylinders between my ring and index fingers. I need this. I’ve earned this.
“Detective Holmes!” A raspy voice greets me as I step out the precinct into what should be private property. A camera flash reminds me that it is not.
“Carrot,” I sigh.
Randy Carrot is a young woman who seems older. Twenty-five going on fifty-five. She has riotous red curls that fall to her shoulders and emanate out sideways at that point, like an attempted mane. She speaks with a thick New York accent from the outer boroughs. She perpetually sounds like she’s smoking a cigarette, though I don’t believe she actually smokes.
Her face is pretty, but her green eyes are slightly buggy, big and wide and always staring out at the world with a fascination linked to any given tragedy’s potential to make her money. She’s shrewd, smart, callous, careful, and let’s just say I’m glad she’s a journalist and not a criminal, because we’d never catch her if she was.
