The CleanSweep Conspiracy (11 page)

CHAPTER 13

Close Call

T
wo men sat in the car, gazing at nothing in particular, both wearing an end
-
of
-
shift bleary stare. The sharp pings from the cooling engine were the only sounds, until the man on the passenger side took a loud slurp from his takeout coffee cup.

“I gotta piss!” The driver grunted and released his seat belt. “Be right back. You OK with that, boss?”

“A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Take your time, Jimbo. The Westside guys are having all the fun anyway, while we cruise around doing next to nothing.” He recoiled as the driver’s door slammed shut.

Jerk
, Brian thought.
Why does he insist on calling me boss?

He felt his phone vibrate in his pocket.

What’s Sam’s name for it, our C
-
phone? He never came right out and said it, but we all got the idea. The C didn’t stand for cell. The C meant a phone Claussen couldn’t listen in on.

The C
-
phone didn’t have any bells or whistles
—
it was just a basic voice, text, and photo phone.

It’s a not
-
so
-
smart phone,
Brian thought as he looked down at the screen.

He pressed his thumb against it until it brought up the text. He’d just started to read the message when Jimbo returned.

“What’s that, boss?” He nodded at the phone as he slammed the door.

“Why do you always have to slam the door? We just got an alert, a flash. These are the two we’re supposed to be on the lookout for. See? Susan Payne and Carl Remington. She’s the one on TV,
Action 21 News
. The guy, Carl, is her cameraman.”

He held the screen up so they could both see the photos. The two men squinted; the dim dome light didn’t help much.

“Them the two that Sammy let get away?” Jimbo asked.

“I’m sure of it. Sammy was sure they had headed west. Our guys staked out a motel on Lakeshore, but they didn’t show. Wait.” He held his hand up. “There’s more.” He read while Jimbo tried to look over.

“What’s it say?” Jimbo asked.

“We’re supposed to be on the lookout. What are we supposed to do here? We know who we’re looking for, but there’s nobody around at this time of the night. The streets are deserted. I suppose they could be in a motel like this. Yeah
…
right.” He started laughing.

“There isn’t anything going on here in this dump,” Jimbo said, wiping his hands on the tail of his shirt. “There wasn’t even anybody in the office. It was locked tight. I had to piss on the side of that wall.” He pointed at his makeshift urinal. “At least I found a corner with a shadow. Hey, boss, wouldn’t it be something if they
were
in this shithole? You think they might be here? They could be in that room right in front of us.”

“Get serious,” Brian said. “This coffee tastes like crap.” He rolled down the window and turned the cup on end, letting the dregs spatter on the asphalt. He was careful to put the cup into a recycling bag he kept next to the seat, though.

The phone began to vibrate again.

“Now they say that Matt Tremain is on the move,” Brian said. “Damn, I sure would like to be the team that catches him, eh?”

“Do they have any idea where he might be?”

“If they do”
—
Brian snorted
—
“they aren’t keeping us in the loop. Can you believe it? They had Tremain’s building cased, and nobody bothered to look for a back door. That would have been the
first
thing I looked for, if it was up to me. Sometimes I think we work with a bunch of amateurs.”

He gave little thought to the fact that he likely fit into that category himself. There he was, sitting in a car with someone named Jimbo, assigned to the far edge of the story. He was definitely not on Claussen’s A
-
list.

“While the two of us drive around on the graveyard shift,” Jimbo added, “useless as teats on a boar hog.” There was a slight chill seeping in, so Jimbo started the car for some heat. “Screw going green and saving the planet.” He laughed and let the car idle until the vents spewed warm air.

They were at the end of a ten
-
hour shift. It had been a dreary ten hours, with no excitement to break the monotony. One problem with a long period of tedium is that boredom creeps in, and monotony leads to a lack of focus and attention. Jimbo and Brian sat in the car, their minds wandering to what they would do on their days off.

“Remember that couple we saw back there?” Brian broke the silence. “It was an hour or so ago. Did you see how they ducked into that doorway pretty damn fast? I don’t think it was these two, but maybe we should cruise back that way. That place we saw them isn’t far from here.”

“Why not?” Jimbo turned on the headlights, flicking on the high beams. “Ain’t it fun shining the high beams into a motel room this time of night?” He laughed as he backed out of the parking spot.

Neither of them noticed the slight movement of the drapes directly in front of their car.

CHAPTER 14

Detective Carling

H
e wasn’t happy. He wasn’t one bit happy. Wallace Carling couldn’t remember what it was like not being a cop. Some of his colleagues didn’t like being called
cops
, preferring to be called
policeman
or
policewoman
,
police officer
, or
detective
—
always insisting on getting the rank just so. Not Carling. He was a cop first, a detective second.

None of that mattered to Carling. What mattered to him was catching the bad guys. But tonight he was sitting in a seedy bar, nursing a glass of whiskey. He found this place when he’d walked the beat in his rookie days, and he knew there wouldn’t be any other cops hanging around. Carling wasn’t a drunk, but he was just beginning to slip out of the reach of sobriety just then.

“Too many cops are just a bunch of dickheads,” he told his anonymous drinking buddy, his words beginning to slur.

He looked at the old man sitting on the next stool, sporting a week’s growth of graying beard.

“They strut around, pumping one another up with self
-
importance, claiming they are protecting the peace and keeping everyone safe. ‘Protect and Serve,’ my ass.” His current companion was an old pensioner who didn’t look up from his cheap whiskey, and was only pretending to listen to what Carling was saying because Carling was buying.

“Get my buddy here another drink
—
and another for me,” he held up two fingers for the barkeep and patted the old man next to him on the shoulder. The man responded by trying to focus his eyes on his free drink. He never quite managed to focus his attention on Carling’s story.

“The justice system is a revolving door, a joke. We push our way through, and once we get to the other side, we turn around and shove our way back. We keep going around
…
and around
…
and around.”

The old pensioner sitting next to him stared ahead and tried his best to nod.

Later, at three in the morning, Carling was back at headquarters, sorry he was feeling sober and reaching in his pocket for heavy
-
duty aspirin. His workstation was situated among a cluster of writing desks. He was glad to be alone. He often did his best thinking at this hour of the morning. Stale coffee was always available in the squad room, he knew, but he reached into his desk’s bottom
-
right drawer instead. He stared down at a flask full of whiskey for a moment, then closed the drawer without picking it up.

He was trying to figure out how he had entered this story, one that had begun long before this moment and would continue long after.

Carling was a veteran cop who had risen from his uniform days to become a detective in SIS, Special Investigative Services. He thought about his personal history, littered with the debris of four failed marriages. It all amounted to this: sitting at his desk at three in the morning, trying to ignore whiskey that was calling to him. He thought about his ex
-
wives. The first was Angela. Then Brittany. Charlene was the one he missed, but she had remarried and moved away. His biggest blunder was the marriage to Tiffany, which had lasted all of three weeks. He’d realized it was a mistake even as he was saying “I do.”

“I should have been sober at the altar,” he’d told a friend.

Carling liked to pretend his current state of celibacy was by choice. He was reluctant to admit to himself it had more to do with bouts of hard drinking and his lack of personal grooming when he was focused on a case.

What set him apart from the other detectives was something subtle but very significant:
patience
. Coupled with the tenacity of a snarling pit bull.

Carling would remain at a crime scene long after other officers, detectives, and forensic specialists left. He would often sit in the middle of a crime scene for hours, saying nothing, appearing to look at nothing in particular. If anyone tried to intrude on that time, he would turn on them with an angry scowl and tell them to buzz off.
Buzz
wasn’t precisely the word he might use
—
suffice to say meddlers left with their ears burning.

He would be the first to admit he didn’t know how it happened, how he solved crimes. He saw them as puzzles, and those extended periods of silence would pay off, draw him to an important clue or a trail that led to solving a case.

“What is it, Carling? Some kind of Zen thing?” people would sometimes ask him.

Carling never bothered to answer questions like that.

Cheap whiskey, memories of ex
-
wives, and current events were all converging on that still
-
dark morning. Rage was building in him like steam in an overheating boiler, the meter registering dangerously high readings. His blood pressure was keeping pace. He put his hand on his chest, and he could feel his heart throbbing. He wanted to blame it on caffeine, but he knew better. He wondered if he was equipped with a safety valve.

“Fuck it.”

He reached into the bottom
-
right drawer and pulled out the flask. He took a long swallow, swishing the whiskey around as if it were mouthwash. He finally let the liquid heat scrape down his throat, take his mind off his anger. He swallowed and recapped the flask. The whiskey did nothing to quell his anxiety, or the false sense of sobriety he was feeling.

It would be dawn soon, and daytime would bring another story. He cleaned up, changed into a clean outfit he kept at the office, and put on his professional face. Day people never saw the night version of Detective Wallace Carling.

He knew why he was angry, and most of all he knew the target of his anger. It wasn’t a
what
, it was a
who
. He fanned pages from a file folder on the top of his desk. The first page he looked at had a photograph stapled to the upper
-
left
-
hand corner. Everyone told him it was all about computers these days, but Carling preferred the feeling of actual paper.

“It just seems to make a case more real to me,” he had told his supervisor, “to hold something tangible.”

“He’s a dinosaur,” he’d once heard someone say behind his back.

I very well may be,
he thought as he looked at the neatly printed case number on the top of the file. Using a marker, Carling wrote Matthew Tremain’s name next to it.

Why did they assign me to investigate this guy? What has he done, really? All I can tell is he’s some kind of douchebag blogger. What law has he broken?

He sat looking at the printouts from Google searches and scanning through copies of Facebook pages. Carling liked to pretend he was old school, but he was actually quite savvy when it came to computers, smartphones, and social networking.

He picked up and reread the printout of an e
-
mail addressed to him from Angela Vaughn, director of security for Enseûrtech Corporation.

“With regard to your investigation of Matthew Tremain, please be advised that this office has first standing in this matter, per Article 7 of the new National Security Act. Attached is a copy of the security order issued by CleanSweep. Further police investigation is superseded by this decree. Please forward all records to the address below. Failure to comply is not an option.”

Carling squeezed the e
-
mail copy into a ball and then unrolled it, trying to smooth out the wrinkles.

This guy hasn’t broken any law, but now I have to send all my case material to this new
…
whatever.
He read the last sentence again.
‘Failure to comply is not an option.’ This bitch is more officious than most cops,
he thought.

Holding the crinkled e
-
mail, he stood up and walked to a window, looking at the lights still on in nearby office buildings.

“What have you done, Matthew Tremain?”

He went back to his desk and looked, page by page, through the file one more time. Creeping into his awareness with silence and stealth
—
the way a cat lowers its belly and slinks up on an unsuspecting bird
—
it came to him.

This guy has something on CleanSweep, and they don’t like it one little bit.

He stood up and began pacing. He thought about the flask in his desk drawer again, but knew it would now have to wait until this mystery was solved. Once Carling sank his teeth into a case, he put all thoughts of drinking aside.

I might be changing my mind about Matthew Tremain now. I rather like what I’m learning about the little shit. He’s like me back in the seventies. All he needs is my old tie
-
dye shirt, an Afro, and his fingers in a peace sign.
Carling smiled as he paged through the file, although he knew the situation wasn’t one bit funny.
Tremain knows something is going on over there. I can’t really blame him for not trusting anyone.

And then there was the e
-
mail response Matt had provided to Carling’s earlier questionnaire: “CleanSweep isn’t clean, but it is sure sweeping.”

Carling was beginning to agree. Carling considered himself old school, and was proud of it. He wanted to be that Norman Rockwell image of a cop in
The Runaway
painting of the friendly police officer and a young boy sitting at a soda fountain together. He laughed to himself, recognizing how corny that sounded. Still, that was the way his inner compass pointed.

He realized he was starting to like something about Matt, which made the case a bit more complicated. He even entertained the idea briefly that he and Matt might become friends. The absence of other meaningful relationships in his life played into such thinking, he knew. Carling didn’t have any real friends. He knew he would probably never even understand why he was suddenly having this new feeling about Matt. In truth, he didn’t try to all that hard.

He was responding to his gut instinct. Matt didn’t seem like one of the bad guys, and he was satisfied with that. He returned to his desk and opened his laptop. He started to type an e
-
mail to Matt, then stopped four words in. It was addressed to
[email protected].
He quickly deleted the address and closed his computer.

It hit him like a shock wave: “They’re monitoring everything I do.”

Instead, he composed a handwritten note in neat, deliberate printing. When he finished, he put it in a small envelope and sealed it.

“Matt,” it read, “you need to watch your back.” He finished the note and signed it “KBO, Carling.”

He stood and picked up his battered fedora. He carried the hat and envelope to the garage, unlocked his car, and drove to The Beaches. He parked around the corner from Matt’s apartment building. When he got out, he looked around for any sign of a tail. Satisfied there was none, he walked into the building’s lobby. He used a master key to open a mailbox door, then he and slid the envelope into the slot under Matt’s name.

He had decided he wasn’t going to tell the high
-
and
-
mighty Angela Vaughn where Matt lived.
Let her people find him.
He laughed to himself as he walked back to his car.
If I could barely find him, let them try,
he thought with a grin.
They don’t know the city like I do.

• • •

Matt had made it back to his apartment without being arrested. He hadn’t been reassured when Cyberia told him his apartment was still safe, but apparently he was correct. He was carrying three bags of groceries as he twisted through the open door to the foyer of his apartment building. “Thanks,” he said to the woman who had held the door for him. He watched her walk out and was starting for the stairway when he decided to check his mailbox. Placing the groceries on the floor, he searched his pocket for the correct key.

Matt’s usual stack of mail was composed of advertisements, so he didn’t bother to check it on a daily basis. He pulled out a handful and was about to throw it all in the communal trash bin when he noticed a small envelope.

“That’s odd.”

He threw the ads away, opened the envelope, and read Carling’s note.

“How did this CleanSweep business start?” The writer of the note asked a question the blogger had been thinking about for weeks now.

The detective’s note said CleanSweep agents knew who they were looking for but still didn’t know where he lived.

“How did this all start?”