BLUE BLOOD RUNS COLD (A Michael Ross Novel Book 1) (11 page)

              She had set two people to run the register at Saturday between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., the busiest hours of the day. Both those people had called off. It was not the first time they had, nor was it the first weekend she'd had to come in to cover for people who did not want to work. She wanted to fire them at once, but that meant even more work on her part minding the store in addition to holding interviews for new openings. It had not taken her long owning the business her father had made before she came to understand why fast food restaurants were always hiring, no matter how many people they had.

              The majority of her business for the day had been pickups. People called over the phone for what they wanted then came to pick it up. That, she had observed, often came with inclement weather. Without a delivery service, the pizzeria had to rely on people coming directly to it, and though she had kept the store the way it had been during her father's day with its wide, comfortable seats and a jukebox with a vast selection of Kenny Rogers songs, people just did not like to stay and eat during bad weather. She suspected that they were pulled by two contrary desires: the desire to stay inside through the storm and the desire for the hot, tasty—if not altogether healthy—food Donnie's made. Often, the desire for food won out.

              By 1:15 p.m., though, the patronage had slowed down enough so that Rosaline Hedfield felt it safe to leave the register for a few moments. She stepped outside, bracing herself against the cold. Despite the rain, she felt sure that it was below freezing outside. She wondered why there was no snow; there had certainly been enough of it in the past week. She let the door close behind her, not wanting the customers inside—all four of them—to be bothered by the chilly breeze.

              The man standing in front of the store looked bad and smelled worse. His clothes bore stains of several different kinds. The large red jacket he wore had holes through its pockets, so that when he stuck his hands into them, his fingers protruded through the other side. His sneakers had visible holes in the sides and over his big toes. A mat of gray, thin hair clung to his head while his limp, wet beard hung against his chest. A scent emanated from him that she guessed was derived from several different sources at once, she guessed from polluted seawater, old garbage, and rotting produce.

              She raised the broom she had brought at him. He flinched away, surprised. She said, “I've told you and told you, no loitering. Clear on out of here.”

              The man gave her a piteous look that failed to move her. She thought, if he were really sorry, he could try taking a bath first. He said, “But I'm watching.”

              On most days, she would have just dismissed his statement as nothing more than the fantasy of a deranged, unbalanced mind. But when he pointed, she turned to look out of instinct. She saw a white Range Rover with blue and red lights attached to its hood. On its side were the words
Shippensburg University Police.
Rosaline, who knew nothing about Dickinson University only two blocks away, stared for a moment. She did not know that universities had their own police departments.

              She said, “Now what are you watching, Harold?”

              The man shook his arm as he pointed. He said, “There's a man in the theater, see? A police man. Only he's wearing a poncho. I can't see. Maybe it's a man. But see that? He laid his briefcase down on the bench by the window. See there?”

              Rosaline did see a briefcase sitting in the front window of the movie theater. She could not recall if one had been there before. She said, “You've got five minutes to clear out of here. If you're not gone by then, I'm calling the police.”

              The man perked up when she said this. Though she expected his eyes to be wild and unfocused, when he looked directly at her, she saw that he was calm, even rational. In that moment, he did not look like a homeless man, much less one who made a nuisance of himself while she tried to operate her business.

              Rosaline decided to go back inside and leave the stench where it was. She feared that she had picked up some of his scent just by standing close to him. While she went to the restroom and used Febreze spray on her clothes, she missed seeing the campus police officer leave without his suitcase. She missed seeing the man that came immediately afterward to pick it up.

4

              Being the duty judge during weekends is a job that no judge wants to take if it can be avoided at all. Officers called more on late Friday and Saturday nights than at any other time. Judge Norbert Russo attributed this to a rise in drunk driving and domestic violence. Too many defendants who came through his docket in Carlisle, Pennsylvania had arrived there as a result of abusing alcohol. For this reason, he had often advocated that the state should prohibit the sale and consumption of alcohol altogether. It was not enough to keep all the wine, rum, and whiskey in the state-operated wine and spirit shops; if people could not responsibly manage the consumption of anything, particularly something as dangerous as alcohol, that thing needed to be taken away until they learned better. That no one listened to him, that even the most conservative bible-thumping representatives in the state congress dismissed him with a distant politeness only served to make him more irate over time. He became a judge who was quick to anger, though not always slow to understanding.

              When two search warrants came to his desk on a late Saturday afternoon, he understood from the description why the two detectives were in such haste. The crime had taken place on campus. The majority of students were gone from campus. As such, if evidence remained to be found on campus, they would have to move fast. It often happened that killers who paid great attention to detail got sloppy in one moment of forgetfulness when they left a key item at home, or left a bloodstain in a place where blood wasn't supposed to be. Sometimes it was nothing more than a loose button. From what Norbert read in the requests signed by Detective Michael Ross, it was a flashlight. The flashlight had presumably been on Officer Bailey's person when he was shot. Find the flashlight and find the killer.

              Though he knew Ross waited on him, he decided to take his time. He leaned back in his large office chair and considered the portrait of the man who had worked on the same bench before him. That man had been Roosevelt Sturgess, a veteran judge who had served until he was ninety-one years old. The legends spoken about him said that he remained sharp as a tack until his final days. He had died in his sleep while in the middle of a small probate hearing that had not been expected to bring any money to anybody, but which had been brought to court due to the long-standing animosity two brothers shared for each other. They had used the courtroom as a means to see who could bankrupt the other first. Sturgess had been amused through the whole trial. He would have been within his rights to throw it out, except that he found it all so amusing—a fact which he had not attempted to hide from anyone.

              Russo remembered those days when he had been coming up as a paralegal working for a seedy personal injury firm that, on more than one occasion, chased ambulances all the way to the hospital. He remembered those days as simple times when a man could go walk a courtroom and know that he was dealing with shysters and crooks. Then, the worst of the worst kept themselves out of the public eye as much as they could in order to avoid scrutiny. Now, as he considered the two requests for search warrants, he reflected that the crooks had gotten bolder. They came out into broad daylight. They acted with impunity, as if they knew that all the dockets were full to bursting, that all the prisons in the country in the state were overflowing, and that the system was slowly beginning to collapse under the weight of the steady increase in crime.

              He sighed and pressed a button on top of his desk that sent a signal to the guard post down the hall. The guard on duty, a bailiff working for the state, received the signal on his computer. Soon after that, the judge heard footsteps come down the hall, slow and measured—the footsteps of a detective. Lawyers, he had found, always walked as fast as possible. Detectives, those he had known, conserved their energy, for they were often doing fieldwork for as long as twelve hours a day. Many of them also had a strong sense of self that crossed the line into arrogance.

              In the three previous times he had dealt with the man, Detective Ross had struck him as exactly that kind of person. Every single time he had walked into the judge's chambers, he had done so in the belief that his requests would be granted. He sat there with a calm self-assurance that most detectives did not possess. In his long career as a judge for Cumberland County, Judge Russo had seen a lot of police officers and prosecutors come into his chambers. He felt at ease when they came hat in hand, ready to listen, unwilling to contradict what he said. Ross was an unusual man, one the judge had trouble figuring out when he troubled himself to do so. Throughout his years as an attorney, he had always understood that the judge's chamber was a place where one had to be on their best behavior. Everyone else he had met in his career acted this way, too, except for Detective Michael Ross.

              He knocked once, and the judge said, “Come in.”

              When Ross entered, the judge saw that he had not bothered to straighten his tie. He had buttoned up his shirt wrong so that one end was a little longer than the other. Though he had bothered to tuck it, the judge could tell from the crooked collar that Ross did not take the meeting seriously. The judge motioned to one of two wooden chairs across from this desk. He knew the chairs were uncomfortable to sit in for longer than ten minutes; that had been the very reason why he acquired them when he had been looking to replace the old leather chairs in his chambers that had been there since 1934. No one was supposed to be comfortable in a judge's chambers except for the judge. That was the point.

              Ross sat down in the chair the judge indicated and said, “Thank you for seeing me, Judge.”

              Judge Russo made a dismissive noise. He said, “I'd like to speak with you about the two requests you submitted earlier today.”

              Russo did not have to mention that he did not appreciate being called away from his duties for a post-haste ruling in order that a detective might gather evidence. It had always been the case that detectives gathered as much evidence as they could without consulting a judge. Russo saw that the case was only a few hours old, and yet the detective was already holding his hand out, asking for help.

              Ross said, “All right, Your Honor, what do you want to know?”

              “I'm okay with granting a request for the president turn over any student names, addresses, and telephone numbers you may deem appropriate for further questioning. You could probably do this on your own with enough searching, but I imagine that you'd like to have it in the official record for when this case goes to trial.”

              “That's right, Your Honor.”

              “
Hmph
, the DA won't like that. Suit yourself, I suppose. That request is granted.” He scrawled his signature on one of the forms. “For the other one, you say you're looking for a flashlight that you believe belonged to the victim, one Kevin Bailey, correct?”

              “Yes, Your Honor. I have reason to believe that Miss Shannon Moore, a student at Shippensburg University, may have played a part in the murder. What part, we don't know. The request I submitted to you took place before I interviewed her this morning.”

              The judge looked up from behind his small square glasses. He said, “Really? Have you learned anything in the course of that interview that would make you reconsider your position on this matter?”

              Ross shifted in the wooden chair, then said, “She's still a suspect, Your Honor. She sustained a dislocated shoulder, among other injuries, as a result of an altercation yesterday with Officer Bailey. In spite of this, she stayed on campus, she says, to move all of her property out of her dorm room. She intends to leave the university and never return.”

              The judge looked down at the form again. He said in a musing tone, “That makes the phraseology of this document rather troubling. You have written here, I quote, 'the dorm room and all the property belonging to Shannon Moore.' You say you wish to conduct this search between the hours of 8 p.m. tonight and 8 p.m. Monday night. If I grant this request, am I to understand that you will search both her dorm room and the property she has removed from there?”

              “That's correct, Your Honor. We believe she may be in possession Officer Bailey's flashlight.”

              “Suppose you find it. How will you identify it so that you can confirm the officer in question owned it?”

              Ross leaned forward. He said, “My partner inspected the flashlights the university issues to police officers. It's a model called Police Tactical made by a company called General Edge. It's my understanding that the university orders its supplies from Amazon, because they can't buy them in stores. Each unit is engraved with a number from one to fifteen. The same number is then branded upon each police utility belt. This means if you have the number six, you get number six flashlight, number six Taser, number six spray can, and so on. Each item on the victim's body had the number eight on it. We're looking for a flashlight with the number eight engraved on it. The number should be engraved on the bottom of the unit. It's not hard to miss; no other department in the area uses this kind of flashlight.”