QUATRE.
HE COULD ALREADY FEEL IT as he pulled his EV into its usual spot outside his apartment/office.
His heart rate, his pulse, quickening.
Almost with a sense of inevitability he turned to see that something had been taped to his front door with a large X.
He got out and stood a while studying the door, absurdly but truthfully afraid to enter his own home.
The warm sun that shined down on him was the detective instinct, that curious admixture of terror and giddy anticipation, the feeling he lived for, photosynthesizing in his every cell.
The same feeling Jordan’s case had given him.
He looked at the packet of stapled papers in his hand. The ‘AFK File’.
He looked at the giant X on his door.
He was already connecting the two in his mind.
As he got closer his feelings of dread were confirmed.
Fixed to the entrance in two crossing strips of black electric tape was a parcel, in the form of a thick manila envelope, covered in postage stamps. Inscribed on the envelope were the words
MITCH COCKS PEE-EYE
👁️🗨️
with a crude drawing of an eyeball underneath.
No return address.
The puerile and derogatory misspelling of his name put him instantly on the defensive, was yet another twist of the knife in his fear cortex.
He peeled the corner of the tape with his thumbnail and ripped the envelope down and went inside.
Δ
Once sealed in his office the first order of business was to turn the coffee pot on.
Why is it that when we know what we want to do, our first instinct is to do something else?
Mitch put it down to wanting to take his time, in order to make sure the environment was just right.
But there was something of wanting to avoid the inevitable present, too.
He was scared of the package, as much as its potential excited him.
While the coffee brewed he lit a mild Costa Rican cigarette from a fresh pack and stood by his desk smoking, looking all the while at the coffee table where he’d placed the strange new parcel next to the printout from Jordan’s house.
The timing, the feeling each gave him.
The gut-punch, unmistakable,
sometimes so thrilling,
sometimes so dread-inducing it all but made him double over in aching agony.
Oh, it’s pingin tonight…
The questions that arose were rational, but defensive.
Could they really be related?
Could two people have come to him about the same case? A case as bizarre as this???
There was no way that Jordan had taped the parcel to his door.
So someone else was involved?
That would mean…
The killer—for who else could it be—
Had been to his house.
This thread of thought lead to a dead end and he paused for a second to let it sink in. Then he laughed.
What an absolute pisstake.
He scoffed out loud at the ridiculousness of it but for some reason the sound of his own laugh scared him.
Suddenly his apartment didn’t feel safe, he looked behind him expecting someone to be there, knife raised, while the floor beneath him turned into a waterbed.
No, it’s silly, he thought. Again, playing defense.
Silly the way being scared of the dark is silly (but you still think twice before walking down that empty hallway alone at night, don’t you?).
It struck him too that the detective instinct he’d come to know and cherish wasn’t about things making logical sense. It was about the possibility that illogical things could happen anyway. That something could be true in spite of not making sense, which made perfect sense to him. It was therefore his job to ascertain the mysterious connection between, what was on the surface, very disparate, even opposite circumstances.
Investigating Mystery, you might say, was his way of explaining the world. It was his primary mode of exercising his freedom as a human being.
It also reminded him that he needed to be more paranoid.
He'd never installed cameras in or outside his house, and the thought that the mystery could so easily be solved just by checking a door camera made him chuckle darkly.
Then the coffee pot’s central API chimed, and a notification popped up on his desktop monitor telling him that the coffee was done.
“Fucking thing,” he said out loud, clicking the x on the notification. He bloody well knew he’d turned them all off.
He poured a large mug and added two sugars. Then he came back to the coffee table. To see about any connections, possible or impossible.
“Well, there’s only one way to find out.”
He sat on the couch with his necessaries and, after a sigh, picked up the envelope. It was decently heavy.
He ran his fingers along the outside. Felt the rich manila.
The stamps, far more than necessary (some were clearly not even real), all had depictions of classic motorcycles on them. Gas-powered, from the 20th Century Golden Age.
Upon examining the stamps, the image of the map from Jordan’s computer flashed in his mind.
The glowing red line he’d drawn that followed the I-111, starting in the deep south where Mr Hunter lived, that from there headed due north, the direction traditionally associated with death, to the hospital downtown and Mrs Kissinger, all the way on up to the burnt out charred wasteland Outside The Ring where the corpse of Mr Zemarkis had been found face down in the ash.
Straight line with a kink in the middle.
The speed at which the killer would have to travel, in order to pull off such a hat-trick of death…
He took a penknife and slit the envelope open.
Δ
Inside was an entire manuscript’s worth of papers.
The stack was thick, and full of meaning. He could feel it in his hands. Looking down on it, it liked to have glowed in the darkening apartment.
He set its bulk down on the coffee table and began to sift.
So many papers. Of all different weights, colours & textures, clear indications of a bespoke temperament. From the most basic glance the majority appeared to be letters—some handwritten, some typed out, produced in all manner of fonts & typefaces. Some were grouped into packets that were stapled together, others paperclipped. Some were annotated, some stamped. Some envelopes held folded copies within while others slipped to the floor, empty.
It was a lot to take in all at once, especially knowing he would have to dissect each piece intimately.
The totality of it hit him in the face, the mountain of work he had before him, but it excited him too because he loved his work. The worst thing in the world was to be bored, without inspiration, with nothing to do.
But be careful what you wish for, Mitch, chided an inner voice, a notif he was unable to turn off.
This was shaping up to be one hell of a case.
He began to separate the mass into individual parts as best he could. Chronology and proper organization would be an iterative process.
Some of these internal envelopes were from the original sender, and bore similar kinds and quantities of stamps, while others bore the postmark of more official police correspondence.
“These look like internal files,” he whispered aloud, sure that if anyone else was there they would find this fact important.
Of the former type the same scary handwriting that adorned the parcel envelope denoted the addressee, and these too had the same pisstake misspellings: a DAMN YUNG SUN, for instance, or AD-MAN SON OF A. GUNN, etc. There were many such variations. One of them was addressed to the JUVIE DET(H) SENT(H)ER.
The more official postage bore the ink-stamps and letterhead of the Los Valles Metropolitan Police Department: Records Division, or the Yorke County Sheriff’s Office, the two biggest law enforcement jurisdictions in the area.
A few had been sent to and repackaged by the Yorke County District Attorney’s Office, which made sense, since the recipient of the letters (despite the awkward misnamings) was clearly the District Attorney for Yorke County, Mr Adam Young, whom, interestingly enough, Mitch happened to know.
The cognitive dissonance of all of this making sense yet not making sense at all was roiling through him when the phone rang.
He looked over at his computer desk. It was the touchscreen landline that was ringing. His business phone.
“Hello?”
“Mitchell. Adam Young.”
Right, Mitch thought. Of course.
“Yes, hello, sir. I received your package, I was just looking it over.”
“What?”
“The package you sent over. It was taped to my door,” Mitch explained, but when only a worrying pause ensued he added, “The letters?”
“Taped to your door? Look, I don’t have time for this. I need you to get down here as fast as you can. Can you do that for me? Can you be here in, say, the next ten minutes?”
“Sure, I’ll leave right now, but what is this——”
“I can’t talk right now. No time. Get down here quick as you can. We’ll have everything for you to sign and ready to go.”
“But——?”
“OK. Great. See you then.”
Click.
Now Mitch was really freaked out.
But he figured going to the DA himself would surely explain it all. Right?
The DA’s authentic ignorance at his mentioning of the letters however, was not comforting.
He let the page he was holding—a 60lb text-weight sheet of waxy pink stationery, sized 8.5x11”, over which were scrawled two sets of handwriting, one cursive, one print—slide down to the top of the mountain on the coffee table with all the others.
Back into the collage of eerie stamps and typefaces, the red white and blue inner lining of envelopes and the bold black toner-smeared Police insignia. A miasma of official nonsense and outlaw procedure.
Sitting there on his table even all jumbled up it made an artistic statement in itself.
It said something about whoever it was who had given it to him.
So much to dig into when I get back…
But it would have to wait. He had to know what the DA wanted. Hopefully it would all be explained, but he was not at all sure.
Without taking another sip of coffee or puff from his cigarette he had grabbed his keys and was out the door.
🗝️