I didn’t realize it at the time but it didn’t take a wild conspiracy to explain the reticence of the police to dust for prints. As in all small, affluent, cities like Santa Barbara, the police have their hands full going to calls for burglaries where real items with serial numbers are taken off to Oxnard to be hawked for a fix. A trashed room, and a wrecked computer, doesn’t amount to much as far as the case load goes. Still, I was peeved and saw the workings of Ryan or Richards in the shadows behind all this. I made my annoyance clear by glowering at the cop as he did his job.“When you find out who these guys are will you let me know tomorrow?” I pouted.
“Hey, will you back off a bit?” the officer pulled a piece of clear tape off the spot he’d dusted, “I don’t know what you expect to come of this but by this time tomorrow your report will be at the bottom of a pile on some corner desk in the assistant D.A.’s office.”
“Won’t you like… run the prints through some list or something?”
“Naw, it ain’t like that at all,” he ripped another piece of tape off of the door and pressed it onto a card.
“Really, if this was a house in Montecito you’d run ‘em, huh?”
“You know that stack of reports I told you about? They’re mostly from folks who actually lost something… from houses in Hope Ranch and Montecito.” He closed up his print kit, handed me a carbon copy of his report but stopped before going out onto the porch and said, “You can replace that hard drive for less than a hundred bucks.”
“Thanks… are you buying?” My quip went unappreciated as he was already halfway to his car.
It was hard to read his name on my carbon copy but I made it out to be, through the faint ink and scrawl, Schmidt or maybe Schultz. I threw it in a corner and went to work putting things back in order. A mess like this was incentive to clean house so I did that and felt pretty good about it around midnight when I finished. I called the dispatcher to let him know I wouldn’t be coming in that night and stayed home with my tidy desk and trusty Remington.. I held the phone back from my ear as he cussed me out, put the events of the past few days on paper and then I finally hit the sack by three a.m.
A couple of days later Adriane called. It was one of those calls I have gotten so many times. She was done with me for awhile as she had other suitors tending to her. I suspect it was Billy, “So are you off the oxy… oh what is it, cotton?”
“Oxycotin… no, I have a few left. But my crater is pretty well healed up and I have someone to run errands.”
“Okay, I’m good with that…” I said that but didn’t believe myself… Never mind convincing her of it.
“I gotta go now, Billy is….” she stopped herself, “Someone is at the gate. I have to see who it is.”
Okay, I thought, one lie deserves another. Billy is back in the picture and it won’t be long…
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