CHAPITRE PREMIER.
PRIVATE DETECTIVE MITCHELL COX sat at a table by the window, in a Flaks’s Coffee Shop downtown.
He was waiting for an old friend to arrive.
While he waited, he had time to look around—— at the shop, out the window at the neighborhood, the college campus across the street.
At all the things that had changed, and all that hadn’t.
A *ching* sounded at the door and in walked Jordan Salavea, his old mate.
For a brief moment their eyes meet.
They’d met freshman year, at the same university across the street, in a class called Intro into Crime. They’d both majored in Criminal Justice, and since they had the same taste in books and movies they quickly became friends.
They also shared a certain vision of their major that separated them from the rest of their classmates.
Crime to them was not just a means of study in order to get a job, as it was pragmatically for most others. Crimes, and their motivations, were for the two of them an obsession.
If you knew what motivated a criminal, and could understand their acts, then you would have the key to solving the crime. Both Mitch and his friend wanted that.
They were kindred spirits in this way. Of the same race.
Detectives.
Crime to them was an Art.
It was a war against darkness itself, and also, an acceptance of the darkness in yourself.
For Mitch especially that darkness was a state of mind, a void that demanded the strongest light in order to make one’s way.
It was a psychic place he went to whenever he could.
A universe of endless euphoria.
Δ
Jordan got his coffee and came over.
Mitch stood and they slapped fives and hugged it out.
It had been awhile since they had last seen each other IRL (they normally talked over an instant messenger online), so before letting go, Mitch held his old friend a moment longer in order to get a good look at him.
The same eyes. The same smile when he laughed.
The same sick style of Hawaiian shirt, short shorts and expensive flip flops. He still wore his signature glasses too, the ones with the clip-on shades that flipped up. On his wrist the same gold watch. There was more grey in his hair now, but he had it faded clean on the sides with a stylish, frosted frizz on top.
And sure, he’d put on a little weight since college, but who hasn’t? He was a big guy anyway, it looked good on him.
To Jordan, Mitch too looked the same. Like he hadn’t aged a day. “Ol Regular-ass lookin Mitch” as he was known, neither handsome nor ugly, dressed in the same plain clothes, with dark reddish hair cut short and a slightly larger than average nose. His eyes told a different story, however. They held within them a perpetually serene look that most people took for dumb, while blank was more accurate. Jordan had seen this impassive look on his friend’s face many a time, even as in class the most gruesome crimes were described.
For no two obsessions are alike, and while they may have had the same philosophy regarding Crime’s potential, their ways of going about solving the mystery were quite different.
Mitch wasn’t concerned with how gruesome a crime was. The most depraved atrocities were committed all the time for very basic reasons. These didn’t interest him.
It had to be a certain type of case.
It had to do something to him.
The cases that interested him would prick his consciousness in a very particular way and he would get what he called his Detective Instinct. Another name for creative inspiration, you could say, if you don’t believe in anything Romantic or supernatural.
He always knew when he found a case of this type by the way it made him feel. It was a sensory experience as well as an intellectual and emotional one. Light and lush. Rich and dark. Ambiguous but never vague. It was always his first lead. The primary clue he would follow until the instinct told him the case was over.
It was The Mystery.
It was what he lived for.
As a licensed private detective now for nigh a decade, he never took on clients and only took the cases that interested him in this way.
Jordan was different. Jordan was more encyclopaedic, more of a scientist.
He ran a website called thejordanproject.net which he billed as a “Comprehensive Database of Local Crime — For the Benefit of the Community®”.
It ran off the custom software he’d written used to track every single criminal act recorded in the City of Los Valles, the setting for our procedural. Police reports, public records, news feeds, social media, any source he could access for data was constantly analyzed in real time and cross-referenced for trends. If anything interesting popped up he posted it on his site.
It was the model used to track “serial killers & conspiracies” that jumped out at him as he was going over the morning figures.
Three separate crimes occurring on the same night, at different times, in different parts of the city.
The night in question?
April Fool’s.
After studying the computer’s findings and deliberating for an entire afternoon, Jordan was still unsure as to whether his formula had produced a glitch or if he’d struck upon something real. Was it a conspiracy, or coincidence?
Only one person would be able to tell for sure.
If somewhere buried beneath these very different crimes there was a subtle pattern—a signature, let’s say, left by a single killer—he knew Mitch was the one who could find it.
“I have all the information back at the house,” Jordan told his old friend. “Come over anytime and check it out.”
Mitch took a moment to think about it, framed by the giant coffee shop window. Behind him, the large anachronistic buildings, the old trees, the obscure statues, all was cast in a lush sepia by the afternoon sun. The color of memory. Of a time not so long ago, but already a lifetime ago.
A certain feeling was beginning to build within the detective as he thought about the curious new case. The sudden realization of it made every cell in his body feel alive.
“Lemme guess,” he said, “the times match up.”
“It’s very tight,” replied Jordan, “but theoretically possible.”
Mitch smiled.
That familiar passion welling up again.
The feeling he was looking for,
Had found him.
A new case.
“I’m interested,” he said.
“Just to be clear,” said Jordan, reaching into his back pocket and drawing out a pack of pale lime green cigarettes.
He sparked one up and offered one to Mitch, who refused.
“Not anymore?”
“Not right now.”
Jordan nodded. “I can’t pay you. But if there is something here and you crack it… I have the means to let a lot of people know. You won’t have any trouble getting clients after that, trust me.”
A waiter came by just then to refill their faux-ceramic mugs with more sparkling hot coffee. Mitch looked at the waiter until the waiter walked away.
He had his doubts as to whether or not Jordan could help him monetize his business. It would be hard considering Mitch didn’t work for money. He was what you could call, independently able to get by.
The economics of the matter were irrelevant. He would take the case without question.
Jordan started to embark on a whole spiel about the possibilities but Mitch stopped him.
“No need to explain,” he told his computer scientist amigo, “Let’s go now.”