We caught the case first thing. There was no call. For some damn reason a patrol was out there, I don’t remember there being a good reason. I’m not one to cast stones, but it might have been boredom, maybe laziness looking for a place to just kick back and get paid to do nothing. It happens, sometimes it’s boring to be a cop, especially out here.

It was a drive to get to the scene, far enough into the country that us getting the call seemed weird. It was damn near out into the prairie, just long stretches of flatness that made you think that there was nothing else in the world other than dirt and sky. Some kinda joke about if your dog ran away it would take three days to lose sight of him.

I was told the land belonged to a long-retired farmer who’d given up any attempts at the corn harvest. The land was barren and dry save for the remains of a scarecrow in the distance. It was the scarecrow I was driving toward, Will riding shotgun, getting closer to the bevy of patrol cars and first responders.

The sun was just rising behind the scene from the way we approached, backlighting it all. So, walking up, it would have been easy to see something almost biblical: the image of a cross from where the scarecrow long rotted away, a form huddled at the base, maybe in prayer.

But not…

I hesitate to give you the details of what I saw, it’s all in the file. Understand I only do so to impress upon you the severity of it. So that it’s more than just words. You can take comfort in knowing that any horror or disgust you feel, was shared tenfold upon those of us who witnessed it first-hand.

The victim’s age was estimated to be in the mid-twenties, no one on scene recognized him. His face had been beaten. Swollen. Blood had crusted around his eyes, nose and mouth. His…his arms had been removed below the elbow and his legs removed below the knee. Barbwire tourniquets wrapped around the limbs, tightened enough to embed the metal into the flesh. Coroner estimates it would have slowed the bleed out, but not much. Just enough to prolong the pain I guess.

We all stood there in silence, trying to do our job. Ten of us trying to go through the motions like we weren’t confused, scared, and just downright sick to be a part of such a thing, to live in a world where that sorta thing happens.

There were no unnecessary questions, no speeches. Nothing poetic or meaningful was said as if the universe needed to hear that we understood something horrible had happened.

I didn’t feel much need to inspect the body at that moment and relied on the coroner’s preliminary. I think I appreciated being able to step back and say I was no expert. I didn’t need to get closer to that kind of reality.

But not Will. Will walked around the scene with that same stoic look on his face. Not rattled. Sure, the rest of us put on a good front, but Will didn’t flinch. It made me wonder the kinds of things he’d seen. Eventually he stopped and lowered himself to his haunches near the body.

I asked if he recognized the vic.

He shook his head no.

He stayed there for a bit looking at what remained of that boy. Eventually I asked if there was something he saw, but he shook his head no again. Something about the way he looked at the body was different. Made me uneasy.

He looked at the body a long while before shaking his head again as he walked back to the car to start the report.

 ***

Taggart jotted something down on his note pad and tilted it so only Monroe could see. Monroe looked over to it, but didn’t directly acknowledge it.

“What did he see? Lieutenant Newton I mean,” Monroe asked.

Ahlers thought about that for a moment. It was weird thinking of Will as a lieutenant. “I don’t know.”

“Did you ever ask him again?” Taggart asked, his eyes on his notes.

“No.”

“Why not?” Taggart asked.

“I can’t say it became my priority to follow up with it. You know…given what happened next…”

“But if you had to guess.” Taggart looked up from his notes.

“You brought me out here to guess at things?” Ahlers asked.

Monroe cleared his throat. “No, I think we just want to get an idea of where you were both coming from that day.”

Ahlers did his best to control his irritation, but failed. “Well it doesn’t have one fucking thing to do with that house or what happened inside.”

“No need to get defensive,” Taggart said in that same way as before, but Ahlers was already beyond trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.

“Fuck off,” Ahlers said and started to stand, “as a matter of fact, don’t bother I’ll—"

Monroe stood too, hands up apologetically. “No, please. Ignore my partner, it takes a few years to get use to him.”

“I’m not going to give him a few minutes. You all bring me in here to talk about history. You could have read a file. Then you got the nerve to angle your questions as if Will did something wrong in all this? Is this some IA scam? You want to know what Will thought, you ask him.” Ahlers tried to breath slowly. He felt more riled up than he had in years. He didn’t like sitting on that side of the table, especially now that his career on the force was over.

“We already did,” Monroe said.

Ahlers narrowed his gaze and looked between the two officers. “Why’re you trying to find holes in our story?”

“That’s not what this is,” Taggart said. “We aren’t IA, and we aren’t worried about what Lieutenant Newton saw or did. We’re just trying to get a better picture of what happened out there.

Ahlers shook his head. “All this time…you could’ve avoided all this shit if they’d taken the report I wrote up in the first place.” Ahlers scratched at a dry fleck of skin on his lip. “What do you know about what happened?”

“You mean about what really happened?” Monroe asked. “Not as much as we’d like. And we want to hear your version. Not the report version.”

“Why? Why now? Unless…” Ahlers felt a tightness in his neck.

“We just want to hear it from you. We already got Lieutenant Newton’s statement, but we’d like to hear it from you since he didn’t see everything you saw, did he?”

Slowly, Ahlers sat back down. “No…no, he sure didn’t…”

Next Chapter: Chapter 3