Rick Haskins, Pt 2 of 2, GTT character sketch

And now the thrilling conclusion!!

Haskins grinned impishly.  “Yeah..  well..  I heard.  I had to swap a shift and break a few traffic laws to get to be the on call for this.   You know how much I love reading mystery books.”

Hayes chuckled.  Yeah, I do.  I’m not surprised you pulled favors for this.  So, you’re the lead.  Sorry, D.A. asked for me on it, I’ll try not to step on your toes.”

The grizzled Sergeant nodded.  “Don’t worry about it.  Lets just start with you bringing me up to speed on this mess.  The labtechs get anything off the DOA yet?”

Hayes glanced back.   “Nope.  It’s a forensic nightmare.  Carpets are waterlogged, but no foot prints.  No prints.  Nothing under the fingernails.  No hair…  just…  a blank scene.”

Haskins tugged at his moustache and thought for a second.  “But the room was so tightly sealed that you had to blow one of the doors off.  Hrmph.”  He looked Jack in the eye.  “Alright.  I’m ready.  Start at the beginning.”

Hayes reached up and rubbed his neck as he thought about where to start.  It had obviously been a long day for him.  “Alright.  First off, security company called in the DOA.  Mountains had his company set to call a friend in the DA’s office if his house triggered the ‘dead man’ code.  Which is why you got called last.’

“Dead Man’s code?”

Hayes nodded.  “Yeah.  You know those microchips in pets that have all their information on the?  Well, the DOA has one of those microchips too.   This entire house, all of his cars, and his offices are wired as receivers.  They detect motion, they start scanning.  They pick up on his microchip and they start biometrics scans, monitoring heartbeat, stuff like that.  So if he has an accident, or is under stress, or one of a thousand other little things, and the building he is in sends a specialized code to his security company.  They reported two heartbeats coming into this room, with the DOAs stopping at seven twenty two p.m., and the second one vanishing from this room about six minutes later.”

“Did the house track where the second one went?”

“No.  Rick, you don’t get it.  It vanished.  It didn’t leave.  Let me explain the security protocols, and Mountains’ particular brand of psychosis.  Maybe he watched his own movies too much, but he was paranoid as all hell.  Every room in everything he owns is set up with ‘dead man’s’ booby traps.  He was convinced that a demon from one of his early movies was hunting him.  I found out from the company that he paid them a lot of money make sure that only they, his butler, and he knew that juicy little tidbit.  Anyway, the fear of the demon made him design a very special setup.  Each room goes into instant lockdown if his heart stops.  Hydraulic driven bars through doors, etcetera, etcetera.”

Hayes briefly motioned to the door that had been removed with explosives.  “But the intention was to keep people out as well as in.  Can’t unseal it from either side.  He had a reason for this.  Sixty seconds after his heart stopped, if the biometrics didn’t come back on line, the room’s hermetically sealed air supply starts to pump vaporized Holy Water into the room until there is enough volume that every surface is covered and there’s a decent amount free floating.”

Haskins had to fight to choke down the laughter.  A picture was starting to form in his mind and he didn’t want to break it before it had time to finish coming together.  “So you mean to say that he wasn’t trying to trap a killer… he was trying to keep authorities out long enough for the house to kill a Demon?”

“Nailed it in one,” Jack sighed. “And you can forget the ‘throw the dagger from the door and run’ scenario because the room’s biometrics recorded the second heartbeat’s vanishing almost five minutes after the lockdown.  So, Rick… as you can see there’s no one here.  No dead Demon.  And a Dead man found in a perfectly locked room.”

Haskins nodded.  “This is gorgeous.  No footprints.  No fingerprints.  No hair.  Ha.  You’ll need a miracle to solve this.  Did you check the suits of armor?”

Hayes jerked a thumb at the closest suit of armor.  “Yeah.  No dice there for two reasons.  One, they’re all glued together and you can’t pull them apart.  Two, the security company says you’d need a heavy duty gel to make a heartbeat vanish.  And since none of the suits are dripping, it’s a safe bet they’re empty.  We did check for joint squeeze on them all also.”

Haskins leaned back against the wall and lost himself in thought.  Another Idea sparked.  “What about the secret passages in the house?”

Jack blinked.  “How the hell did you…  No, never mind.  Security and blueprints show five secret passages.  But none of them hook up to this room.”

“Didn’t think so, but I had to check.”

While Haskins kept reassembling the puzzle in his head, the rookie from downstairs walked into the room, brandishing a twenty dollar bill like it was a shield.  He held it out to Haskins.  “Sarge, you were right about the food in the kitchen.  At least its normalish down there though.  Up here its like walking through an x rated episode of Scooby Doo.”

Hayes raised a questioning eyebrow at Haskins as he snagged the twenty.  “Thanks, rooksticks.  It is, isn’t it.  Oh…”  Haskins realized his intuition had been right and started laughing.  The laugh picked up momentum until he was clutching at his sides and gasping for air.  He looked up through an ear to ear grin, while the other two men just stared at him, confused.

Sucking in his breath, he finally managed to clamp down on the laughter.  “Oh god, that’s rich.  Its right in front of you Jack, and you all missed it.  Let me make a guess at something here.  You’ve already checked in with his legal staff, and since he doesn’t have family, all his money is willed to various staff that work for him right?”

Hayes nodded.  “Yeah Rick…  But that doesn’t solve the murder; it just gives us a suspect list.”

“Actually, it does.  God, he got you guys good.  I may have to go back and watch his movies now, because this is just far too clever.”

Jack blinked in annoyance.  “Excuse me?”

“Think, Jack!  He was a master of suspense!  Stop look at the forensics.  Stop looking for the who done it.  Stop being a cop for a minute and think like a horror movie director.  You have to find the surprise twist if you want to figure this one out.  Get it yet?”

Hayes chewed his lip for a moment then shrugged.  “Sorry, no.  Explain please?”

“Ha.  Alright, here’s your first clue, Jack.  He concocted the whole demon story.  It was a trap – for you.  He wanted to box the police and the security company into a specific way of thinking just to get revenge on whoever killed him.  He knew this was coming, bet you anything you find death threats in a safe, or a desk, or something.  I think he even figured out who was coming for him.  So he made up this whole thing, and the killer is sitting in the room with us right now.  Don’t you get it?

“He set this up so that if the killer DID get to him, they’d have to go through their own personal hell, a horror movie of his devising, listening to us and praying to god that we wouldn’t figure it out.  And he set up the whole thing by making you think that he was having paranoid delusions; just to throw you off the scent of what’s really happening here.”

Again all Jack could do was blink and say “Excuse me?”

Haskins reached up and clamped a hand on Jack’s shoulder.  “Think it through.  Locked room.  No windows.  Sixty seconds till water is introduced to the room’s closed system.  Yet there are no footprints… which means that by the time the water settled onto the fabric – the killer was immobile.”

Hayes looked around.  “So someone is in this room with us, but dead?  How do you explain the heartbeat vanishing otherwise?”

Haskins glanced around.  “Easy.  The killer knew the security setup, otherwise he’d already be nabbed and in cuffs.  And the killer’s motive was money.  Otherwise why use the dagger off the plinth to kill him?  He made it look like a botched robbery.  You said a motive, but you missed one thing.  Only one person could have known about the will and the security setup.  There was one important fact missing from the killer’s knowledge.  Suits of armor are usually held together by a wireframe..  and all Mountains had to do to build the perfect prison was grind powdered glue onto the edges and joints of the suits of armor.”

Hayes’ eye lit up and he slowly nodded. “Oh lord that is devious.”

Sergeant Haskins nodded.  “It sure is.  The killer locked himself into his own prison.  As soon as the holy water was pumped into the room, all the suits of armor got glued together – and the glue doubled as the gel to hide the heartbeat!  The killer’s clever hiding spot becomes a prison, and he’s listening to us right now.  And since only one person could have known both those details about the will and security..  wha-la!  The damned Butler did it!  And you’ll find him as soon as you grab a blowtorch and start cutting up the suits of armor.”

Jack’s eyes went wide and the entire forensics team hurried over as the suit of armor next them coughed and said in an affected British accent.  “Um, burning me up won’t be necessary.  I give myself up.  But..  please..  hurry up?   He lined the inside of the suits of armor with the glue too and I’m having trouble breathing…

Rick Haskins, Pt 1, GTT Character Sketch

The Scooby Doo Who Done It

Featuring:  Sergeant Rick Haskins

Haskins carefully angled the cruiser between the other emergency and rescue vehicles.  He felt and heard, rather than saw, the shrubbery; just a moment too late to avoid flattening it.  With a grimace, he said “Screw it” and finished parking.

Carefully, so as not to scratch the ambulance parked next to him, he opened the door of the squad car and squeezed himself out.

Haskins had been a fairly heavily muscled youth, and age was beginning to make those muscles go just a little bit soft.  Combine that with a P.D. standard issue vest and he wasn’t left with much room to get out of the car, or through anywhere else that might be considered a narrow exit.

He paused for a moment and took stock of his surroundings.  The sun was setting low over the Rocky Mountains, with its lights bouncing off the cloud cover, creating wide, rich bands of yellows, oranges, and reds across the sky.  The mansion’s entry drive was crammed to the point of being overflowing with emergency vehicles.  Squad cars, SUVs, ambulances, and somehow even a fire truck were all packed like sardines in a tin into an area meant to hold two Rolls Royces and a butler.

He shook his head.  The whole scene reminded him of nothing so much as a big top circus.  Running his fingers through his closes cropped salt and pepper hair, he clutched his clipboard and strode forward into the mansion.  Inside the house the décor was trying so hard to be cultured and sophisticated that that it seemed more packed than the zoo of a parking lot outside.  Expensive paintings, tapestries, vases, ancient pottery pieces, and clashing modern art sculptures covered every wall and available surface in the entry room.

Haskins ignored the rookie cop standing by the door for a moment just to try to fully take in the room’s aggressively forced culture shock.

This just screams white trash with way too much money he mused while critically scanning the room good grief… I wonder how much he paid to have someone figure out how to make people this uncomfortable as they walked in.

Nodding to himself, he decided that the ambiance felt just right for a b rated horror movie director who’s movies had all become cult legend.  Just right.  Finally he glanced at the uniform by the door.  “So, anyone look in the kitchen yet by chance?”

The kid couldn’t have been more than twenty-one.  They seemed to be getting so much younger these days. “No, sergeant, sorry.”

Haskins grinned.  This was way too easy, but the kid would learn with age.  “Twenty bucks says that you find… lets see… three foods in abundance.  Doritos, frozen dinners, and Hamburger helper.  But before you go check, could you point towards the scene?”

“Sure Sarge.  You’re on for the twenty; no way a posh guy like this liked that crap.  Corpse is upstairs in a gallery room.   Up those stairs, down the spooky hallway, take a left where it does a T.  You can’t miss it, they had to take the door of the room off with explosives.”  The kid grinned weakly and pointed to an ornately banister stairwell that curved up to the next floor.

Stroking his mustache, a lifetime ‘I’m thinking’ habit, he glanced once more around the room, looking at all the little details and things that we’re wrong with it, then he walked over to the stairwell and headed up.

If anything, the second floor was even more aggressive in its theme than downstairs had been.  The theme here was ‘creepy and cobwebby’.  All of the paintings up here were portraits, and they seemed to be of unknown and unremarkable people, all of whom seemed to have large thick foreheads and ugly features.  It reminded him of…  Oh, good grief.  So perfect! He shook his head and strode through the ghostly gallery, took a left, and walked up to the scene of the crime.

The entryway before Haskins was a wreck.  Twin steel doors had once filled it, but now one of them was propped open and the second was blackened around the hinges and handle, and was leaning against the wall next to the doorway.  Striding through to the room on the other side, his initial impression was of vastness.

The room was gigantic.  At least fifty feet long, and almost as wide.  Haskins’ faded blue eyes glittered as he took it all in… and a grin slowly started to spread across his face.  Suits of medieval armor stood to attention around the walls of the room, each sporting a different livery.  Numerous glass cases were placed between the armors, showcasing beautiful pieces of ancient weaponry, all apparently authentic with papers displayed under them.  Scottish claymores, folded katanas,  African tribal spears…  this whole room was a shrine to the ancient art of warfare.

And the cherry on top was a series of tapestries, hung off of support frames in a grid pattern around the room.  And finally, in the very center… a bloody corpse at the foot of an empty plinth trimmed with glowing fiber optic cables.

The cause of death was readily apparent, since most people couldn’t survive having a main gauche shoved through their heart.  Jonathan Mountains, horror icon, had been dressed in a red velvet smoking jacket, khaki pants, and blue fuzzy bunny slippers when he met his violent end.

Several figures, hard at work documenting every detail of the scene, surround the body in a halo of black-lights, finger-printing dust, cameras, and lab coats.  Two of them wore suits with I.D. badges flipped open and hanging from the breast pockets of their blazers.  Beethoven’s Ode to Joy was softly playing in the background on the house’s speaker system, and could almost see the crimelab team moving to the music as then hunted for clues.

One of the two detectives stood up and carefully took a couple of steps away from the corpse before straightening his jacket and sighing.  He walked up to Haskins.  “Hey Rick.  Sorry that you got the call so late.  You Glendale’s on call tonight?”

The detective was mid thirties or so, maybe ten years younger than Haskins.  He was tall, thin, and so clean cut that he looked more like a banker than like a cop.  Haskins shook his hand.  Jack Hayes might look out of place, but he was a damn good cop, and often got bounced around jurisdictions because he had a reputation for delivering air tight cases to the D.A.’s office on unsolvable crimes.

“You lucked out.  This is an honest to god Locked Room Mystery.  First real one I’ve ever heard of.”

Tune in tomorrow for the next installment of “The Scooby Doo Who Done It!”

North by South, a GTT character intro

North by South

From The Ian Stone Cases

The thug’s fist slammed into my jaw.  Even rolling with the punch, I felt one of my molars shatter and cut the inside of my left cheek.  The thug grinned and spit his toothpick into my face.

I looked up to him and smiled.  ‘So, why the hell are you here?’

‘Shaddup!’ he snarled and fed me another knuckle sandwich.  This time my shattered tooth cut me badly enough that I had to spit out the blood or choke on it.  I looked back up at him, working my jaw trying to stretch some of the soreness out of it.  The guy was wiry as hell, maybe six feet tall or so, and wearing a blue silk shirt with the top half of the buttons undone; the guy looked like he was right out of a 1980’s cop show.  Yeah, he thought he was a real Guido.

He was rubbing his knuckles, trying to massage some of the pain out of them.  It doesn’t matter how strong or experienced you are, shatter a guys tooth with a hit and you’re taking some damage to your fist.  His lips pulled up into a sneer. ‘Not so tough now, huh mr. private dick?’

Tilting my head up till I could look him in the eyes, I grinned and let the blood spill out of my mouth.  I love a good straight line.  ‘Thanks pal.  You just saved me the seven hundred bucks that getting a root canal was gonna cost me.  I’ve got a bad one on the other side too, think you could get that one next?’

With a snarl he smashed his heel down onto the arch of my left foot.  I felt something break, but didn’t let it show.  Time to pause for a second while I explain why a broken foot was worth it; just to get to deliver one tough guy line.  The thing about being a private eye is that you have to know how to take advantage of your timing.  No matter how much you work on cultivating that no nonsense, tougher than nails, dumb looking but smart on the inside, hard boiled gumshoe lifestyle, the simple truth is that ninety-nine percent of the work you land is boring as hell.

Skip traces, reading court records, checking websites, occasionally finding lost pets, and sneaking through bushes with a camera is most of what a P.I. does.  The majority of the work comes from one of three places – Lawyers, Courtrooms, and suburban wives with too much money and too little to do who fill their hours with unfounded suspicions.  A good P.I is fast with a computer, since their usual day is just sitting at a desk scanning files.

Which is why when you wake up to find yourself handcuffed to a chair in your own office, with a thug putting more shots into you than a sadistic E.R. doctor gives out during flu season, you have to thank your lucky stars and make the most of it.  Which I did.

So now we’re gonna play out the next few seconds nice and slowly, just so you can appreciate the finer details.  As mr. oh so clever repartee’s fist came rocketing towards my face, aimed at that same tooth, I braced both of my ankles against the chair legs and twisted my left wrist just right; which made my thumb collapse against my palm.  My first case ever was to find a lost pit-bull.  When I did find the dog, he satacked me and all but ripped my left thumb off.  It never healed quit right, and I’ve been able to do interesting and occasionally useful party tricks with it since then.  And for some reason I can’t fathom, the left side of my body tends to get a lot more torn up than the right side.

My hand slid out of the cuffs, only taking a little skin with it, right as my own personal thug straight from the set of Miami Vice dropped an a-bomb on my face – finally ripping my left cheek open.  I let the force of the blow carry me, pulling up with my ankles and whipping around, letting the inertia help me pivot the chair on one leg.  I grabbed the back of the chair with my right hand, releasing the pressure with my ankles and just slumping forward.  Ever seen a tetherball?  It goes low on one side, then rockets high on the other side.  That’s what me and the chair did.   I went low, the chair went high, with all that spinning force behind it.

I’m not even sure if I have the stomach to describe what it did to his face.  A lot of blood went flying over me.  Lets just say this – ever tried to break a piece of oak?  His face shattered the chair, and the chair took the lesser of the two beatings.  K.O.  Goons, zero, private detectives one.

I slowly pushed myself up, using the corner of my desk to help me, and carefully testing my weight on my broken foot.  Not comfy, but it’d get me around for the time being.  I’ll admit I wobbled a bit until the world stopped spinning, and then limped over to the downed thug.  I reached down, grabbed him by the shirt and hauled the dead weight over to the radiator.  I grabbed my cuffs and secured both of his wrists behind his head.

Slapping him a couple times I grinned and said ‘Hey, jerk off.  Miami Vice stopped casting twenty years ago.’  Nada.   Yeah, he was out cold.

So instead of pushing his primitive ape brain and trying to get info out of him, I limped back to the desk, picked up the phone, and dialed the local police station.

A tinny sounding female voice answered after just a couple rings. ‘District six dispatch.’

I sighed and did my best to enunciate around all the damage to my mouth.  ‘Hi.  Can you patch me through to Sergeant Haskins, please?  Tell him it’s Ian Stone with a pretty big emergency.’

There were a couple of clicks from the phone and the operator’s voice came back.  ‘He’s at his desk right now. I’ll put you right through Mr. Stone.’

‘Thanks.’ I replied.  Hey, hard boiled gumshoe or no it always pays to be polite to your local law enforcement.  You never know when you might want them to return the favor and be polite to you, after all.

‘You’re welcome, Mr. Stone.’ The line got quiet and I started hearing those background clicks again.

I only had to wait about twenty seconds or so before a gruff voice came across the line. ‘Haskins here.  What’s the matter, Stone?’

I smiled.  Haskins had spent so much time behind that desk since his promotion that even on his home line he had started answer the same way.  “Hey, Sarge.  Got a little problem here at my office.  I just had a goon who’s dressed straight from the 80’s bust into my office, taser me, cuff me to a chair, and then vent a lifetime of frustration at being born in the wrong decade all over my face.  And Haskins, the hell of it is, I’ve never met the guy before and he wouldn’t tell me why he was here.’

There was a sharp intake of breath over the line. ‘Jesus, Ian.  You okay?  Uniforms or paramedics there yet?’

Blood dripped onto the mouthpiece of the phone and sighing, I wiped it off on my shirt as I peeked out the window from behind my blinds and looked down at the street below my office.  ‘Yeah, I’m fine.  Look, I can’t waste time.  I have to figure out why this guy was on me.  So, I called you first.  I want to dodge the ambulances and the reports till I get a good grip on this.’

Haskins chuckled and I carefully watched the street.  ‘Alrighty.  I’ll grab a black and white and be there in five to ten, tops.  Can you wait that long?’

‘Not Sure.’ I replied. ‘I think I have his partner sitting in the street down here.  Looks like a two thousand and two silver Lincoln towncar.  You better come unmarked so we don’t spook him.’

‘Already on the way.  Hold tight, Ian.’  The line went dead.

Down to business.  Limping over to my medical kit, I cleaned up a bit, trying to go as quickly as possible without further injuring myself.  I glanced at the clock.  Two minutes down.

Again I pushed my broken foot.  I knew I had to move fast, no way Haskins would let me out of his sight when he saw the condition I was in.  I got down on my knees in front of the K.O.’d goon and emptied his pockets.  While there I looked a little more carefully at his hands and the way he was dressed.  On a hunch, I cleaned the blood off his hands and studied them more carefully.

Dumping the payload from his pockets onto my desk, I gratefully collapsed into my leather chair.   Here is another tip about being a private eye.  Invest in a damned good chair.  Besides the fact that you are gonna spend a lot of time in it doing the mundane jobs, you gotta be sure to have a god chair for just such situations as this.  I mean, beat to bloody hell with broken bones…  Would you want a chair that didn’t have all the goodies and about six inches of expensive padding?

Four minutes down.  I spread out the contents of his pockets and took stock.  One set of brass knuckles.  Which was odd, because this guy had calluses all over his knuckles, and brassies leaves the marks on your fingers instead.  So, fact one.  He enjoys his work.  Wallet.  Almost five hundred cash, one driver’s license, season pass to the football field, and an injury report on the local teams.

I glanced at the license and groaned.  I hate it when stereotypes are right.  His name was Antonio Guido Pazzuchi.  Well crap.

I grabbed the cash and looked at the last pieces of pocket junk.  Hey, don’t look at me like that.  I might have been cuffed to a chair, but he had engaged my services by my reckoning, and five hundred is one day plus expenses.  So, a paperclip, a pack of gum, three cents, and a folded piece of paper.  I unfolded the piece of paper and found a smudged name and address, barely readable.  It smelled like beer.  Hmm…  My name, and my address..  but not quite right.

I heard a commotion downstairs and outside.  That’d be Haskins, grabbing scumbag number two. Almost out of time.  C’mon stone, you have the edges of the puzzle, now put ‘em together.  On intuition I grabbed the phonebook out of the bottom drawer.

I swear to god, it clicked right as Haskins walked into my office, roughly pushing the other guy in front of him.  The guy couldn’t keep his balance with his hands cuffed behind his back, and fell forward onto his knees.  He looked pissed but was keeping his lips firmly sealed.  Same slicked back hair and mid eighties bad guy look as the guy I had laid out too.

Haskins took in the scene, ran a hand through his graying hair, and started to speak.  ‘Ian, holy…’

‘Wait.’ I interrupted and held up a finger.

I sighed and looked at the kneeling goon.  ‘How much does Stone owe?’

The guy looked from me to Haskins then at his partner, out cold and cuffed to a radiator; and decided communication was probably his best route.  I’m sure it didn’t hurt that as bloody and torn up as I was I must have looked like an axe murderer at that moment.  ‘Uh… You owe ten large, with fifteen points on your late fee…’

I threw the phone book at him and grabbed the piece of paper, holding in front of his face.  ‘No, I don’t, you asshole.  This is SOUTH Colorado boulevard.  Your stone is north.  NORTH.  Learn to read, moron!’

I saw Haskins get it, and he threw back his head laughing.

As it turns out, the two guys had warrants out.  I claimed a thousand dollar reward on each, walking away from the whole thing with twenty five hundred – and just over three grand in medical bills, as well as a cast for a month.  Sometimes being a P.I. is a dog’s life.