Heat Check
Grabbing her kit, Anita suggested that they split up for the time being. “I’ll look for the casing and take the ground floor; you take the basement den and the laundry room. We’ll do the upstairs together afterward. Remember to check all the windows, closets and any patch of floor not covered in permanent carpeting. These old houses sometimes have trapdoors and secret passages from Prohibition days.”
Intrigued, Cal pulled on his latex gloves, took out his flashlight and headed towards a basement staircase the notes said would be on the other side of the foyer. In just over three years working Patrol, he’d never seen a rumrunner’s escape tunnel, but he’d heard about them from a couple of guys who’d worked Riverside. Naturally, Cal was a professional police officer, but something about his inner child still found the prospect of a secret gangster lair pretty damn exciting.
Descending down the winding, rickety stairs only furthered this sense of walking backwards in time. The scratched wooden walls were populated by all manner of rusted and weathered garden tool, hung on crude metal hooks installed before stainless steel was the bee’s knees. He surmised that they belonged to a previous owner of the home, as the unkempt walk leading up to the house made it clear that Mitchell wasn’t much of a gardener. As he rounded the landing and down the second staircase into the home’s deep basement, Cal turned on his flashlight and found the light switch.
The sudden presence of light quickly shattered all his visions of Motown booze dealers in the roaring twenties however. Like any obscenely rich crime lord worth his salt, Mitchell had laid the joint out in extravagant style. The staircase ended in a short, marble-tiled hallway accompanied by six faux-Japanese style electric lanterns, strategically placed along both finished wooden walls. Off to the immediate right was a door labeled “Laundry”, but Cal’s eyes were naturally drawn towards the spectacular den that lay at the end of the hallway.
Stepping across the hall, Cal quickly realized that the room actually bent back towards the right, lining up under much of the kitchen and dining area. This created an absolutely massive space into which Mitchell had loaded another huge leather coach, a couple of matching recliners and what looked like a king sized bed along the far wall. The entire room was also littered with entertainment devices and personal electronics of all types. Cal had counted no less than two large televisions, a couple of Surface tablets and at least four video game systems. Ray had even found room for a small desk unit in the back right corner to house both of his newer-model computers. Cal had no idea why a drug kingpin needed so much hardware, but the son of a bitch had clearly answered the PC or Mac question with the word “both.”
Glancing around the room, Cal noted that the den was illuminated primarily by another eight miniature electric lanterns, but there were also three long, rectangular windows set up high along the two outside walls. From the back yard or side of the house, the windows would be barely above the ground and getting inside of one would by no means be comfortable, or easy. It would likely be impossible for a fat person, but he guessed that a reasonably fit intruder could slip in under the cover of darkness; probably without being noticed by neighbors Mitchell himself had trained to look the other way. The two windows along the left wall sat high above above the desk unit and the entertainment center respectively, but the third window was slightly larger and hung directly over the bed.
For a moment, he wondered why a paranoid professional like Ray wouldn’t have put bars on the windows, but the riddle solved itself immediately when Cal noticed the open box of condoms laying on the nightstand. If this was in fact where the victim brought women for sex, he probably didn’t want the bars fucking with the carefully constructed ambient lighting. Paper Forensic photo tags next to various objects in the room indicated that the lab boys had already been all over the place, but the window over the bed seemed promising and Cal moved in for a closer examination.
The moment Cal actually stepped foot in the room, he was immediately overcome with a strange wave of nostalgia and apprehension. For half a second, he was no longer in Ray’s extravagant love nest, but somewhere else entirely; somewhere from deep in his past. Half-forgotten memories of childhood summers spent at his favorite aunt’s house drifted over him like a warm, gentle breeze. The glow of afternoon sunlight, a faint whiff of Pledge and a stern voice asking him why he was still wearing shoes flooded his mind. Looking down, Cal immediately realized that he was standing on long weave, Saxony carpeting made of real wool. There was something extra springy about expensive wool carpets and Cal knew as much from past experience, because he’d spent months of his childhood in a house covered with the stuff.
Although his family was decidedly working-poor, his aunt Linda had managed to marry a wealthy entrepreneur on the second try. Truthfully, Cal knew she had absolutely hated his father, at least until the man died working foot patrol for a security company when Cal was just twelve. Aunt Linda always had a soft spot for her sister’s kids though; Cal and his sisters spent numerous summer vacations at her husband’s place on the edge of Grosse Point. She’d passed on a few years ago, leaving all of her money to her own children and more favored relatives; but he still remembered that house like it was yesterday. Now Cal once again found himself standing on a lush wool carpet, in brand new Oxfords he didn’t feel comfortable wearing. This time however, there was no angry butler anywhere in sight.
Continuing on toward the window, his hopes of cracking the case all by his lonesome were dashed when Cal spotted the Forensics sticker tag next to the wooden frame. There was also a notable amount of dusting powder on the floor and on the wall immediately beside the window pane. Standing right next to the scene, he could make out a thumb-sized, dark blue smudge in the area the lab techs had photographed. Finally, a close up view revealed obvious stress marks on the wooden window frame. Maybe, he wasn’t the only one failing to keep up to date on the investigation notes thought Cal; Anita hadn’t mentioned anything interesting about the basement and everything he saw suggested the window above Mitchell’s bed was the likely point of entry. Even if Jerry and Ragland had somehow missed this, the photographers certainly hadn’t.
On the one hand, this was frustrating news because it meant that he was indeed wasting his time searching the basement, just like he’d predicted upstairs. The upside was that Cal had finally caught his partner making a rookie mistake, and he had every intention of holding it over her head as soon as they got back to the car. Chuckling to himself, he looked down towards his feet in embarrassment; he reveled in delight at the thought of teasing his sanctimonious co-worker for the next few days.
That’s when he saw it. What exactly “it” was wasn’t entirely clear at first. All Cal saw was a whitish, rectangular object peeking out ever so slightly from under Mitchell’s bed. The mattress frame was set just in front of the back wall, leaving a narrow corridor from which a person could enter and exit on the left side. He hadn’t seen this pathway from the other side of the room, Cal could really only see it clearly once he was almost at the wall and right next to the mattress. Sticking out at most an inch or two into the laneway, he thought perhaps a stack of envelopes had somehow fallen under the bed. Only when his flashlight passed over them, did Cal Newsome realize that he was looking at a bundle of fifty dollar bills; stacked neatly and held together by ordinary elastics on either end.
