BLUE BLOOD RUNS COLD (A Michael Ross Novel Book 1) (4 page)

              She said, “Come with me. Let's go talk to them, see what they have to say.”

              She did not have to turn her head to know that Zoe followed closely behind, hiding behind Lorraine's taller body, trying not to be seen.

6

              Shannon Moore felt stronger with so many people around in a way she had not expected. Alone, by herself, she had always felt vulnerable. She craved the company of others by whatever means she could find it. Sometimes this meant taking several old magazines, a hot glue gun, and a pair of scissors to make small flowers out of airbrushed pictures of women wearing expensive clothing. Sometimes it meant forcing herself awake early in the morning when she would rather sleep so that she could share breakfast with any member of the group that happened to come to the dining hall. Sometimes it meant staying out late at night so she could talk and gossip and listen. She had not regretted a single moment that she had spent getting to know other people, for she found that others made her laugh, made her cry, made her angry, made her frustrated, but above all, made her feel fulfilled.

              The feeling that developed in her while she walked with the crowd to the front of Old Main was something new entirely. She felt strength growing inside her—strength that came from outside herself but which nevertheless entered her, became a part of her. Had she come alone, she had no doubt that she would have collapsed in tears. There were times when she was all too aware of her weakness in the moments when her eyes watered whenever she tried to talk about her problems. There were so many things to talk about, she often did not know where to start. Outside of the group, and outside of studying, she found solace in the moonlight during the few infrequent times when she really was alone. Each time, she promised herself she would find a friend in which to confide her deepest, most painful secrets. Each time, she went on smiling as though nothing was wrong while pain lurked just beneath the surface.

              With so many people around, she felt as though she could finally be herself. She could let go of all the inhibitions she'd held for so long. She could let down all her defenses and just be.

              She knew it from the moment she saw President Clifton come out of the front entrance of Old Main. Despite the cold, the president was not wearing a heavy jacket, or even a sweater. Her arms were bare up to the middle of her biceps. Her short gray hair ruffled in the strong morning wind. Her light blue rimmed glasses hung from the low collar of her shirt. That only drew attention to the tan skin on her chest, a sign that she had recently been to the beach. She had not made any attempt to hide this fact from the student body. The woman flaunted her tan as though it was a badge of honor. That had only made her the butt of several jokes across the campus.

              She called out, “Everyone, please calm down.”

              Shannon glanced about her, trying to figure out to whom the president was speaking. No one among all the students that had gathered in front of the building appeared unruly. They stood in the cold, some shivering, some sniffling, none of them willing to speak up. They had at first chanted, but then had stopped. Now they just stood in place, silent. She rubbed her bare hands together, trying to keep them warm. In her haste to leave the dormitory, she had forgotten to put on her gloves, her fur trapper's hat, and her scarf. Nothing protected her body against the elements save for her thick ski jacket that came down to her thighs. As she felt the cold press against her face, she wondered—not for the first time—why she had chosen to attend college in her home state and not somewhere in the south. She had been accepted to Furman University in South Carolina among the dozens of southern schools to which she had applied. She wished herself at Furman, away from Ship, away from the cold, and from the old woman standing in front of her who thought nothing of the suffering of others.

              Shannon said, “You killed her.”

              A look of shock passed over the president's face. Though it was there and gone, her wide eyes and open mouth conveyed everything all at once—all the disregard, the excuses, the inaction. No one in the crowd missed the president's surprise, least of all Shannon.

              The old woman said, “I beg your pardon?”

              Indignation stirred in her then. She wanted, more than anything, to grab the president around the neck and choke her until her face turned purple, until her eyes bulged out of their sockets. All of her irritation at the cold weather suddenly disappeared. She forgot that she tended to get sick when she stayed out in the cold too long. She forgot that she had forgotten to dress warmly, or that she left her bottle of organic coconut oil laying on top of her dresser next to the heater where it would melt by noon. She knew only a cold, black rage that welled up and welled up until it demanded to find release.

              She shouted, “You killed her! You evil bitch! You killed her!”

              The president took two steps back, gasping for breath. Then, someone from the crowd threw a snowball. The wet, slushy snow burst apart on the president's chest. Another one flew over her head. Shannon shouted again, using all four of the obscenities she knew.

              That was when she saw the big police officer with broad shoulders and a muscular chest come forward. Beneath his uniform, he looked like a bodybuilder. He had short black hair, buzzed down with the exception of a small curl that stuck out above his forehead. She knew him from the time she had attended a self-defense class at a women's conference back in September. He had also been there in October when one of her friends held a service learning project teaching young women how to change tires and check engine fluid levels. She'd gotten her hands dirty with black grease as she had tried to figure out just which dipstick she was supposed to pull out. She thought well of the police officer, even though she could never remember his name. He had always been there with his steady, quiet presence, sometimes frowning at her.

              When he advanced on her, she had no fear of what he might do. She thought he might speak a quiet word in her ear, or take her aside to offer a word of comfort. Instead, he wrenched her arm behind her back and forced her to the ground. Her jaw struck the pavement. She felt something give way in her shoulder socket. The pain was beyond anything she expected. She cried out, for the first time feeling real terror. She had not thrown a snowball—why was she being wrestled to the ground?

              He let go, then stood over her. Though her vision had blurred, she saw that he had a canister of something in his hand. She said, “Stop, please stop.”

              An orange mist shot out from the canister. Her body went haywire all at once. She could not breathe. Her eyes stung while her world went black. She felt a burning sensation in her nostrils, and in her mouth. She screamed, though it hurt to do so. She heard the sounds of shock from the crowd, and then chanting. Someone picked her up, held her in a pair of arms. She curled up into a ball, fearing that the police officer had her. For the first time, she thought she might die from suffocation, or from chemical poisoning, or from some other cause she hadn't yet imagined. The pain in her shoulder burned all through her. She could not move her right arm. She let it hang loose and limp, not even trying to defend herself.

              She heard the president say, “My god.”

              Shannon managed to choke out three words. She said, “Go fuck yourself.”

7

              The next morning, which had a funereal atmosphere on campus after ninety percent of the student body had departed in the wake of the assault on Shannon Moore, a body lay on the cold, snow-covered sidewalk in front of the library. Red blood had frozen overnight, lying where it was in a pool beneath the body of a man. The man wore the badge of a police officer on his chest. He had a curl of black of hair just above his forehead. Six bullets had been lodged into his chest, the first of which had killed him before he hit the ground. Were it not for the assistant librarian coming to work early to go through the list of materials due at the end of the semester, the body might not have been discovered until noon. The librarian tripped over backwards, falling on her butt. She held a hand over her mouth, not believing what she saw. Then, instead of calling the campus police phone line as she had been instructed to do in case of emergency, she called 911.

1

              When the alarm went off at six in the morning, the miniature lumberjack with a smiling face and the words
Welcome to Vermont
painted carefully on its stomach fell to the floor. A hand reached out for the cell phone that gave off the alarm in the form of a twenty-second clip of classical music. The figurine thumped to the floor, as it had done many times before. A pair of feet swung themselves out from underneath two heavy quilts, one of which slid off one side of a queen-sized bed, crumpling to the floor. The feet pushed themselves into two blue slippers, then supported the weight of a man who stood up and stretched his arms above his head while he yawned.

              Michael Ross had forgotten that the alarm he had set for the previous Saturday morning, during which he had been working on a nonstop investigation, had not been removed. The alarm had carried over to the following week. He had wanted to sleep in on his first day off in five weeks, yet he knew that once he was awake, he was awake. Nothing could be done about it unless he became tired, as he often did, watching old Diagnosis Murder episodes that he had downloaded from the Internet. He never found the show particularly interesting, especially due to how neatly every case was wrapped up at the end of each episode. Real life was rarely, if ever, so simple. Rather, having watched an episode of the show every night before he went to bed, his body had come to associate the show with sleep. Now, when he wanted to watch it during his free time, he found himself yawning at Dick Van Dyke's sometimes clever witticisms.

              That, he decided, might not be a bad idea for something to do after lunch. If he couldn't have his extra sleep during the morning, he would have it in the afternoon. He walked out of his room and into the hallway of his trailer home. A shiver passed through his body at how cold it had gotten. Partly out of habit, and partly because he wanted to save money whenever he could, he always turned the heat down when he slept. The thermostat sat at sixty degrees, though the thermometer he'd tacked to the wall next to the controller read fifty-nine. As he turned the knob up to seventy-five, the heating system kicked into gear and pushed out air from the four floor vents in the house. Though he knew the system would take at least an hour to heat up the house to the temperature he preferred, he decided to have his breakfast anyway.

              He went back into his bedroom, put the figurine back in place, and wrapped the quilt around his shoulders. He turned the hallway light on to keep from tripping over himself, as he had done before on more than one occasion. He walked past his lemon-lime-colored bean bag chair, his desktop computer and laptop, both sitting on low ankle-high Japanese tables. There was no television in his living room, no couch or reclining chair. There were, however, bookshelves placed in front of the windows on either side. Books of all sorts lined the shelves—some on web design, others on chemistry, still others from Robert Heinlein, an unsorted collection of out of print books that he'd tracked down through library book sales, yard sales, Internet auctions, and a variety of other places. The tables, the computers, and the books were the only luxuries he allowed himself to buy with his discretionary income ever since he decided that he had something greater in mind with his detective's salary.

              He opened a cupboard next the refrigerator and pulled out an old black frying pan that he had purchased secondhand at a thrift store. He pulled out two strips of bacon from a ziplock bag in the fridge and let them sizzle while the element on the gas stove put out small blue flames. He pulled out another ziplock bag, this one with a collection of brown liquid and matter that looked like someone's internal organs. When the bacon finished, he grabbed a slice of liver with his bare hands, then washed his hands at the kitchen sink with a green bar of Lava soap. After the bacon, he added a slice of watermelon, then took it all to the living room where he sat down in his beanbag chair to look at the upcoming matchups for his fantasy football team.

              After washing his dishes and his hands, he brought the quilt back to his bedroom and made the bed. That was a habit that he'd kept from his four years in the Army where he'd had to fold his white underwear just so, make his bed just so, or else face the wrath of anybody with any rank who happened by. Though he no longer folded his underwear or his socks, he still made his bed. Whenever he left his bed unmade, it gnawed at the back of his mind until he finally did. He fluffed his pillows and straightened out the sheets, noticing as he did so that the sheets were ready for their monthly ironing.

              He vacuumed the floor, then gave kitchen a cursory scrubbing. When he finished, he sat down in front of his computer to play a Super Nintendo game when his cell phone went off in the other room. He rushed over and answered it on the third ring. He said, “Hello, Michael Ross speaking.”

              The man on the line spoke in a morose, deadened voice. He said, “Hey Ross, got a case for you. You want the overtime?”

              Michael recognized the voice of Billy McGee, his fifty-two year old partner who insisted on being called William instead of his nickname. Naturally, everyone in the department called him by his nickname to irritate him. He was a career officer, one who would probably end up as a sixty-five-year-old beat cop before they finally forced him into retirement and a pension. He, unlike Michael, had only made detective the previous year and was only just beginning to enjoy the privileges that came with the position. For him, this meant being able to wear a suit and tie, rather than showing up in a blue uniform that didn't fit quite right and made his back itch.

              Michael said, “Am I allowed to know about the case before I make my decision? What do you have?”

              “I can tell you the surface details. You know, confidentiality and all that. You ready for it? You sitting down?”

              Michael sat down on the edge of the bed, his phone held in front of him on speaker. He turned the speaker off and put it to his ear. He said, “Okay, go ahead.”

              “We got a dead cop. A campus cop. Shot in the chest six times, all center mass. An expert shooter, whoever it was. Time of death estimated sometime in the night, some fourteen hours after a near-riot on campus. We'll know more once the coroner gets a good look.”

              Michael's mind sprung to work at once. He knew enough about college to know that it would be a difficult case with a lot of commuting involved. The majority of the witnesses would have left home for the weekend. He looked at his cell phone and pulled down his notifications. The date said Saturday, December third. He didn't know when finals were, but he suspected they would be soon. After finals came fall graduation, an event held on a Saturday when everyone, including the graduates, wanted it to be over and done with as soon as possible.

Michael was twenty-six when he graduated and remembered the ceremony as a boring, drawn-out affair full of long speeches and longer introductions for each student. His last name, beginning with the letter
R
, meant that he had to stand in place for an hour and a half in an eighteenth century playhouse rented for the occasion. He had taken his diploma, shook the hand of an overweight woman in a loose gown, and left as soon as he could. He hadn't invited his family. He hadn't even told them he had graduated until his twenty-seventh birthday had come in April of the following year. Then, his mother had pressed him with all kinds of questions. He had answered as truthfully as he could, indulging her, for he knew that while she lived on welfare with metal plates in her back and an oxygen tank next to the bed, she knew nothing of the outside world save what the evening news brought to her. The event of graduation itself had been so unremarkable, so commonplace to him, that he had never thought it worth mentioning. As far as he was concerned, college graduates and college dropouts could only be differentiated by the pieces of paper they possessed.

              Instead of giving his partner an answer, Michael said, “A near-riot on campus?”

              A rustling of papers sounded over the phone. Billy said, “As that information is pertaining to an open investigation, I can't tell you about it unless you sign on. You know how it is, red tape and all.”

              Michael pondered his partner's request for a moment. His partner, who knew better than to push the issue, let dead air pass through the phone connection. Michael knew about red tape; there were times when he thought the world would drown itself in rules and regulations before too long. Some of them served a purpose. Many achieved the opposite of their intended purposes. Though he'd learned to live with it after fifteen years on the force, he'd never quite come to accept the system of rules under which he worked.

              At last, he said, “All right, I'll take the case. Where's the scene? Where am I going?”

              “You're going to Shippensburg University. Would you believe it?”

              When he had heard the word
campus
, he had immediately thought of Wilson College, an all-girls institution that claimed to be a liberal arts school but was, in fact, a heavily religious institution. He'd heard of more disorderly conduct cases involving men on that campus than any other college he was aware of. There were a number of schools in the central Pennsylvania area, none of which had Wilson's particular problem. He had always thought that if any violence would be done against a campus police officer, it would be a jealous boyfriend—or a jealous girlfriend—who didn't want the police interfering in what they were doing.

              He said, “The overtime is approved by Dickie, isn't it?”

              Billy said, “Sure, he's the one who told me to call you. You were his first choice. Not because you're good, he says, but because you're not doing anything else today. He doesn't want to take anybody else off a case.”

              Michael laughed. “Well, I appreciate the vote of confidence. Let the duty officer know I'm going on duty, would you? I'd like to get out to the scene as soon as possible before somebody ruins it.”

              “All right, consider it done. I'll be headed over there myself. If you get there before me, save me a piece of the action, yeah?”

              Michael pushed his slippers off his feet. Then, he stepped on the cold floor, colder than he expected. He said, “I'll keep the scene open as long as I can. Before you go, just so I know, is there any reason the campus police itself isn't handling this investigation?”

              Billy scoffed. He said, “Those amateurs? You're kidding, right? Hey, I gotta go. See you when I see you.”

2

              Since Michael Ross lived in Carlisle, he had his choice of driving down Route 81, the highway, or Route 11, the rural route. As it was an early Saturday morning, he chose the rural route, knowing that he wouldn't be forced to pass slow drivers who took the long stretches of farm country as an invitation to drive five miles an hour below the speed limit. No one drove on Saturday mornings; if he'd been asked on a Monday morning, he would not have taken the case. More than anything, he wanted an excuse to drive down the empty roads all by himself.

              Next to his trailer home was parked his red 2000 Pontiac Sunfire car, which shimmered in the early morning sunlight. As he walked down the steps of his front porch, Michael saw his breath stream out in front of him. Though he had bundled up, the day felt bitterly cold. He had to remind himself that it was still early December, and not the middle of February.

              He hurried into the car and started it up. He turned the heat on low, watching the engine temperature as he drove. As he drove down Route 11, he passed truck stops, gas stations, and fast food restaurants on both sides of the road, all of which were open but unoccupied. He passed a few tractor trailers sidling up into the left-hand lanes for fuel and food stops. Once he passed the Interstate 78 exit, the area grew ever more rustic until he came into the town of Carlisle. There, he passed through stoplights—all of which were green—until he turned right towards Dickinson University.

              As he drove through the various pedestrian crosswalks and past the university's athletic field, he was struck by how peaceful everything seemed. Before he made detective, he had gone to Dickinson at least once a year for the purpose of networking with the campus police there. Many of them rode bikes through the town on holiday weekends, the only thing they could do to enforce the local laws, since the town of Carlisle and the university grounds melded together.

              Not so with Shippensburg. While driving down the rural road, going well over the speed limit, he put a cassette tape into the car's stereo system. Before long, the familiar notes of “2112” came through the factory speakers. Michael let his mind drift. His didn't need much conscious thought to drive to Shippensburg, for he'd been down the road countless times. As one of only six detectives working out of the Shippensburg Borough Police Department, he'd grown accustomed to driving up and down the two paths that led from home to work. As a result, when he made a right turn then drove down a slight incline which led to a large red, white, and blue sign that gave the university's name, he was surprised to find that the tape had already flipped. Now, Geddy Lee sang about boarding the Thailand express. Michael turned off the stereo and pulled over to the side of the road, putting a red light on the roof of his car. He turned the flashing light on, though left the siren off.