Unrevealed (3 page)

For those of you who don't know me, my name is Jane Perry and I'm a homicide detective here in Denver, Colorado. Technically, it's Sergeant Detective Jane Perry, but most people I know just call me Jane. Being a cop is all I know how to do, and I'm good at it. That's not arrogance,
that's confidence. I am the job, as they say. If I were flipping burgers, my head would still be programmed as a cop. It's in my blood. My dad was a homicide cop, and his buddies considered him top-notch. I didn't follow in his footsteps to be like him. The last thing I want to be is like my father. I'm a homicide cop because I like to wrap my mind around the mysteries of why people kill other people. I like to get into the heads of the killers.

I like to run around inside the victims' heads even more. I can walk into a hot crime scene while the blood is still wet and death still hangs heavy in the air and I can hear the walls whisper their secrets. Sometimes I can hear the screams and pleas of the victims before they took their last breath. Not hear it like in my ear. It's more like hearing it in my gut.

God, I sound fucking nuts. But that's the only way I can describe it. It's not some kind of psychic shit. It's so much deeper than that.
I hear the dead with my gut
. Yes. And it consumes me. And, believe me, it's changed me inside forever.

My former boss, Sergeant Morgan Weyler, who I now work alongside since my promotion to sergeant, is the one who actually talked me into writing down this particularly strange story. He thought it would be “cathartic” for me, since I refuse to go to therapy and be psychoanalyzed by a woman who keeps a dog-eared, tear-stained, heavily underlined copy of Freud's biography in her bathroom resting precariously on the back of her mauve toilet.

The first and only time I met the woman, I was immediately turned off by her sparrow-like features, translucent, veined skin and weak jawbone. She talked so quietly that I had to lean well within her three-foot comfort range just to hear her. When she told me I needed to “explore my boundaries and process my authentic self,” I wanted to cap her with a 9-millimeter plug. She “suggested” that I had “anger
issues.” I told her she didn't need a degree in psychology to figure that out. The guy at my corner coffeehouse who's twenty and still hasn't graduated from high school made that brilliant deduction during my first interaction with him. When I left her office, she said I was being too “judgmental” about her. Those types of women love that word,
judgmental
. What they don't realize is that when they tell someone that they are being judgmental, that's a
judgment
. But they can't hear that because the irony horn is blaring too loudly.

I tend to read people fairly quickly. You have to be able to size others up in my line of work — to separate the real victims from the liars. But I've been sizing up people's actions since I was small child. When you're abused as a kid, you learn that you better assess people and their possible actions quickly because if you don't, you're going to be on the receiving end of one helluva punch. So I became what some therapists call hyper-vigilant. Sometimes, I had to judge a violent situation within seconds of its erupting. So I spend a lot of time stepping back and observing people. I'm always on guard; always waiting for the proverbial shoe to drop. That's probably why I smoke. I think the nicotine takes the edge off but allows me to still focus.

One way I learned to read people was through their body language and voice tones. People's mannerisms and subtle voice alterations are massive “tells” in determining whether someone is being truthful with me. My dad, Dale Perry, taught me all about body language, and he was damn good at it. That is about the only good thing I can say about him because he also taught me how to be a great drunk, how to fear, how to hurt, how to hate, how to see life as continual struggle and how to never feel that I'm good enough. Jesus, now
I
sound like a damn victim and that's the last thing I want to be. I despise victims. Not victims of crimes…victims
of life. People who can't build a bridge and get over their inner turmoil. I'm actually particularly drawn to people who've had to walk the harder path and come out better or worse on the other end.
Survivors.
Yeah, that's who I champion. Maybe that's because I see myself in them. I have great empathy for the survivors of this world because I know what it takes to climb out of severe trauma and reach deep within your heart and soul and resurrect yourself into a new reality.

My road to resurrection has been a long and strange one. During that trip, I've encountered some — how can I say this without sounding crazy? — otherworldly phenomena that I can't explain but that have operated within my life and the lives of those around me. Mostly, it's the bizarre synchronicities — coincidences — that defy logic. Sometimes, I've experienced prophetic dreams or feelings that have materialized in the waking world. The first few times it happened, it scared the shit out of me. I attributed it to too much booze. While the booze may have loosened me up to make me open to the phenomenon, there was something else operating outside of the bottle. I no longer fight it, because in many ways, I've always allowed my intuition to guide me, even on hard-to-solve homicide cases. So these days, when I encounter the odd person or the odder circumstance that borders on the unexplainable, I don't fight it. I don't try to explain it, and I try to work with it instead of against it.

I can give you a great example, one that definitely feeds into what I was mentioning earlier about feeling empathy for the survivors. I drew the short straw at the office (which is Denver Homicide, or simply DH) and was asked by Sergeant Weyler to give a classroom career-day lecture at one of the public middle schools here in Denver. If you knew me, you'd know I am
not
the person to be sent out to a goddamn school
to talk to these annoying midgets about my job. But, like I said, I drew the short straw.

So I get to the school for my 2:00 p.m. appearance, and I'm greeted by the effusive female principal who chose to wear her red power suit and four-inch black heels that day. And here's me, in my denim jeans, cowboy boots, light blue poplin shirt and leather jacket. I felt like the dyke who came to dinner standing next to her. After she shook my hand with her firm grip, she leaned forward and sniffed the air around me.

“You smoke?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I admitted, “but I won't pass them out to the kids.”

She got that deer-in-the-headlights expression on her face, not sure if I was kidding. She suggested that I take off my jacket, hoping that would erase the scent of tobacco, but I assured her that the nicotine was deeply embedded in my cell structure and probably had penetrated my DNA, so it was useless to remove my jacket. I then moved my jacket just far enough to reveal my Glock, which I always keep in my shoulder holster when I'm on duty. I thought she was going to fall backward on her four-inch FMPs when she saw it. She asked me to remove my service weapon, but I was getting pretty pissed by this point and told her that if the Glock left the building, so did I. I was actually hoping she would take me up on that offer because I really didn't want to sit in front of a bunch of jacked-up munchkins and field questions from them.

Unfortunately, she asked me to follow her into a sixthgrade classroom, where I was met with thirty pairs of gawking eyes. She introduced me as “a
female
detective” from the Denver Police Department, which I certainly thought was obvious since I do have shoulder-length brown hair and
enough of a chest to not create confusion as to my sexual identity. But this broad seemed to want to make sure the kiddies knew I was a woman who was
also
a cop. Boggles the mind, eh? I guess that's because
Cagney & Lacey
was way before their time.

I had just been asked to sit on a wooden stool in front of the class and start my talk (which I hadn't given any thought to) when another teacher entered the classroom accompanied by a kid who looked about fourteen. He was taller than the other dwarfs in the room, and he was dressed like a junior anarchist, complete with black trousers, combat boots,
Matrix
jacket and T-shirt that sported two words in red block type: Question Everything! A quick glance at the powersuited principal told me that she wasn't happy to see the kid joining the class. All the pint-size members of the classroom turned around to gawk at the kid, who returned their stares with a crooked smile and a raised eyebrow. Even though he was led to a seat in the rear, I could see that there was something wonky with his left eye. He looked like he'd been bashed around too many times and had suffered some sort of facial trauma.

Irritation filled the space around the principal, who clicked her heels across the vinyl floor toward me and spoke in a hushed tone she usually reserved for admonishing wayward students.

“Looks like we're having an unexpected extra member of the class today,” she whispered as a low murmur rolled across the classroom from the pre-pubescent pack. “His name is Fletcher. He's…um…how do I say it?” She searched valiantly for the proper PC term but came up short. “Special needs,” she settled on. “He's been held back a couple years,” she motioned to her own head, rotating her index finger around her temple in the universal hand gesture for “fucking
nuts.” “Sometimes we don't know where to put him. If he starts to get disruptive, we'll pull him.”

We'll pull him
? I thought. It sounded like code for “We'll take him out and
ice
him. Eighty-six him.” Then I wondered if the poor son-of-a-bitch had any clue how many people looked on him as a pain in the ass.

I no sooner
thought
that than Fletcher yelled above the din, “Pain in the ass,” and let out a cheeky chortle.

The principal shot Fletcher a look that would melt steel while I looked at him in stunned amazement. It was just plain odd. But maybe it was a
coincidence.
Yeah. Right. How many times had I used that old saw of an excuse to rationalize an occurrence that defied reasonable explanation?

The kids were told to quiet down, and the floor was turned over to me. Suddenly, I had thirty pairs of tiny eyes staring at me, waiting for wisdom to pour from my mouth. I'm not counting Fletcher in the pack, as he was staring into space at this point with his mouth loosely hanging open, like his jaw had broken hinges, and looking quite lost. It was a tough audience because they seemed at once curious and judgmental of me. I started talking with my usual cadence, which is crusty and forward. I don't have a “voice” for kids and a “voice” for adults. It's all the same voice, and I think my tone kind of scared some of the kids in the front row because I saw them leaning back in their little seats. That made me feel uncomfortable, so I attempted to change my voice to make myself sound “safer” but then I started to sound like I was tripping on Halcyon. I was reminded of Sergeant Weyler's admonishment before I left DH. “Watch your mouth, Jane,” he warned me. I have a tendency to use crude language, which my job tends to perpetuate. Frustration was building by this point and I
thought,
“Fuck this shit.” It wasn't
a second later that Fletcher jerked his head away from the window and screamed, “Fuck this shit!”

Half the class giggled as the other half said, “Oooooh.” The principal was about to “pull him” when I intervened. I told her to let Fletcher stay. The fact was I wanted to try a quick experiment. I
thought
, “Hey, Fletcher. Calm down. Can you hear me?”

I swear to God, the kid stared at me and said, “Yeah! I'm calm.”

The rest of the classroom time is a blur. When I opened the floor to questions and answers, it went something like this:

“Can I touch your gun?”

“Is that a real gun?”

“Can I touch your gun?”

“You ever kill anybody with that gun?”

“Hey, seriously, can I touch your gun?”

“Did you ever shoot yourself by mistake with your gun?”

“Hey, lady cop, can I
please
touch your gun?”

Finally, the teacher piped up and introduced a new question. She wanted to know if there was any adage that I've learned from being a detective. I
thought
, “If you get a call that there's an incident on Colfax Avenue, it's a guarantee that someone's been capped.” Not a half second later, Fletcher raised his right hand with his thumb and index finger positioned like a gun and softly said, “Bang!” But then, instead of staring out the window again, a look of sorrow filled his face and he buried his head on his desk.

I turned to the teacher and came up with the first clean, age-appropriate answer I could think of. “I learned that you can't judge a book by its cover,” I offered. She seemed disappointed in the answer, so I elaborated. “In my line of work, criminals don't always look like what you all see on television.
Sometimes the bad guys look like the good guys. Sometimes the clean-cut person is really a monster and sometimes the strange-looking ones are the kindest.” I tried not to look at Fletcher when I said that, but out of the corner of my eye, I could see him peeking out from where he'd buried his head in his arms. He was sizing me up.

“So how do you tell the good guys from the bad guys if you can't judge a book by its cover?” the teacher asked me.

“You listen to your gut and let it guide you.”

I could see that she had no damn clue what I was talking about. We all have the ability to use our intuition, but we've been conditioned to always let logic override the process. Hey, I'm all for using logic; God knows I incorporate logic all the time, especially when I'm listening to a perp's interrogation and I hear an inconsistency in his/her statement. But you need to use a blend of logic and intuition. Too much logic and you ignore your gut; too much intuition and you lead with your heart more than your head. But it was obvious from the look on the teacher's face that she'd been programmed to call a spade a spade even though it might actually be a shovel.