brendan halpin

Hey folks! Another crime story for you! Enjoy!

“This is domestic terrorism!” Chuck Butcher stated while pointing around the grounds at all his dead plantings.

Chief Williams had actually been on the site of an act of domestic terrorism many years ago. It was considerably grislier than some dead hydrangeas. Or whatever the dead plants were.

“One hundred thousand dollars worth of plantings!” Butcher continued. “This is a hate crime!”

Williams was tempted to ask Chuck Butcher whose hundred thousand dollars he had spent on the plantings. But Butcher was the son of the governor, and Williams liked his job as the police chief of a sleepy little rich people’s town where the worst thing that happened was the occasional case of alcohol poisoning at a teenage house party or a DUI after an adult house party.

Chuck Butcher wasn’t too popular in town right now—he was actually not too popular in a lot of towns after his “hedge fund,” aka Ponzi scheme, had gone belly up. Chuck had escaped indictment because his dad was a good friend of the new President, and Daddy Butcher had called in a favor to get the DOJ to back off his little boy. So a lot of rich people were significantly less rich because of Chuck, and he would apparently never be punished for his wrongdoing. Must be nice.

“Can you think of anyone in town who has a reason to dislike you?” Williams asked.

Chuck Butcher stared at him for five seconds, then said, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“I’m not,” Williams said.

He was.

But he was going to pretend that he wasn’t. “I need suspects if I’m going to solve a crime. Smells like they used vinegar on your plantings. You want me to go to Star Market and get a list of everyone who’s bought vinegar in the last month? I need something to go on.”

“I have security cameras,” Chuck Butcher said. “The latest thing. Maybe you’ve heard of them.”

“Well, let’s get a look at that footage, then!” Williams said with what he hoped was perfectly feigned enthusiasm.

The footage, timestamped at 3 AM, showed a figure in black pouring vinegar from gallon jugs all over Chuck Butcher’s plantings. They wore a hat and a mask, so it was going to be a challenge to identify them. Williams really wanted to tell Chuck Butcher that there was nothing he could do, but he also really didn’t want the State Police climbing up his ass about this. One call to his daddy and Chuck Butcher could and would make that happen.

“Got any views of the road?” Williams asked.

“Of course,” Chuck Butcher said, tapping on his iPad to bring up the footage. At 3:20 AM, the flower assassin had walked onto the road shouldering a large garbage bag presumably full of empty vinegar jugs and turned south. They walked along the side of the road until they were out of sight.

“Nice they didn’t litter, anyway,” Williams said.

“Chief, you don’t seem to be taking this seriously. Well maybe you’ll take the state law enforcement review board seriously,” Chuck Butcher said. Looking in his eyes, Williams could see a bully’s rage. He’d seen it before. First in high school, when he’d been one of five Black kids in school, and then later from cop co-workers who got murder in their eyes if a brown kid mouthed off. One of the reasons he left the city and came out to the vanilla suburbs. Chuck Butcher wanted his way right now, and how dare you not ask how high when he says jump?

If the “victim” here had not been the Governor’s son and therefore connected to the new Administration, Williams would have dropped it right there. But he needed to go above and beyond on this one.

“I’ll canvass the neighborhood and see if the perpetrator shows up on any other security footage,” he said. “I’ll be in touch. Can you email me that footage?”

“Already did,” Chuck Butcher replied.

“Thanks, Mr. Butcher,” Williams said.

*

Williams went to every house south of Chuck Butcher’s house for a mile. All of them said that they hated Chuck Butcher and that they had solid alibis because they’d been in their homes asleep at 3 in the morning, which they could verify by sending over their security camera footage.

They did. Fortunately Officer Elbert Lodge the Third, aka Trey, a local kid who had drank his way out of UMASS and landed in Williams’ office, was in for the day and was able to review the footage and put together a timeline of the vandal’s movements. They could be seen passing all of the houses for a mile, which meant the vandal was probably not one of those homeowners. Then they seemed to disappear.

Williams didn’t believe people could disappear, but he did believe in the nature preserve that was just past the final house. He asked for the preserve’s parking lot footage, and shortly thereafter, Trey was able to pick up a black shape illuminated by moonlight walking into the woods. It looked too short for a Sasquatch, so Williams assumed that was the vandal. There were essentially infinite exits from the nature preserve onto at least three different streets, none of which were covered by security cameras. It looked like the begonia (or whatever) killer had gotten away with it.

“Pretty good escape,” Williams said. He called Chuck Butcher to relay the news.

Chuck Butcher was not pleased with Williams’ assertion that the case was unsolvable. Five minutes after he got off the phone with Chuck Butcher, Williams got a call from the Commander of the State Police.

“Chief Williams, I’m just wondering if you need a little help out there. Seems like you’ve had some terroristic actions happening in your jurisdiction, and you might be a little over your head. We’re happy to bring our resources to bear on this issue.”

“I don’t think that will be necessary. We haven’t exhausted all our avenues of inquiry,” Williams said. “I’ll be in touch if we need you.”

“I’ll be in touch if I don’t hear from you in the next 24 hours,” the Commander of the State Police said.

Williams hung up the phone and sighed.

That night, he picked up Michelle and drove to an Italian place two towns over for dinner. Williams actually preferred the stares he got here for being a Black man in this town to the stares he got back at home for being the chief of police. And he didn’t want his relationship with Michelle, a soon-to-be-retired teacher at the high school who had gotten the house and a sizeable chunk of money when her finance bro ex-husband ran off with a Hooters waitress, to be all over town. Realistically, though, it probably was anyway.

He wasn’t supposed to talk about the case, of course, but he did. He lived alone, and though he talked to his daughters often, small town policing was not high on the list of interesting topics they wished to discuss with Dad.

“So why don’t you let the staties handle it?” Michelle asked as she popped a tortellini into her mouth.

Williams sighed. “Because the State Police are assholes. Top to bottom, they’re the kind of cops who give cops a bad name. If I don’t find who really did it, they’ll just find someone they want to blame and send them to trial.”

“But if the suspect disappeared into the nature preserve, isn’t that the end of it?”

“They had to come out somewhere. It’s a pain in the ass, and too much work for me to fob it all off on Trey, but now we have to ask everybody. Because somebody has footage of this person coming out of the woods.”

*

Somebody did.

The next day he and Trey went to every business and home that abutted the nature preserve and asked if they had security footage of the road. Most did not. Those that did showed nothing helpful.

“Hey,” Trey said after a full morning. “Can we stop by the mall? I want an Aunt Annie’s pretzel dog.”

The mall was technically in the next town, but it was only a five-minute walk from the nature preserve. It shared a parking lot with a 24-hour Home Depot, so it would be a very good place to stash a car for a few hours in the middle of the night.

While Trey went to get his pretzel dog, which Williams assumed was actually an excuse to flirt with the girl behind the counter, Williams went to Home Depot and asked if they had security footage.

“I can do better than that,” the loss prevention manager, a guy named Ted who assured Williams he always backed the blue, said. “We’ve got a license plate reader. People think they can get away with stealing at 2 in the morning. But not when I’ve got footage of them getting into their car and a clear license plate. Last week a guy walked out of here with six hundred bucks in power tools hidden under a piece of sheetrock in his cart. They got him two days later. This isn’t some hardhat—the guy is #2 at one of the biggest developers in the entire metro area.”

Ted continued at great length about his crimefighting career as a loss prevention officer. Williams thought it would have been significantly less tedious to go to the courthouse to get a warrant for the footage.

Finally they reviewed the footage. And at 4:07 AM, a figure dressed in all black emerged from the woods near the parking lot and walked to an Acura sedan. Williams sighed. He wasn’t even going to need a license number. The vandal had removed her hat and mask before getting in the car.

He and Trey went to Nancy’s house. “You can wait in the car,” Williams told Trey. “I don’t think I’ll need a lot of help with this one.” Nancy, a widowed retiree, was the chair of the Friends of the Library. She also organized the annual summer festival on the Town Common which the whole town attended. People still talked about the fact that someone or something called Guster had played before they got famous, which could have been between two and thirty years ago as far as Williams knew.

“Chief!” Nancy chirped as she opened the door. “To what do I owe the honor?”

Williams sighed. “Call your lawyer, Nancy. And do not say another word to me until your lawyer is present. Understand?”

Nancy’s cheery facade fell away. She nodded and picked up her phone.

“Grab a sweater or something,” he said. “It’s cold in the cells.”

*

That night, Williams was in his solarium doing yoga, which had, with a great deal of difficulty and false starts, replaced whiskey as his stress relief of choice, when his doorbell rang.

He extricated himself from pigeon pose and answered the door. Michelle was standing there, eyes ablaze with anger.

“You arrested Nancy? Are you fucking kidding me?!”

“That’s where the video evidence led. What am I supposed to do, bury it?”

“Yes. That’s absolutely what you should have done. A woman who’s done more for this town than anyone—certainly more than you—is in jail tonight, and Chuck Butcher is free. Does that sound like justice to you?”

It didn’t.

“It’s my job, Michelle. If I’d slow walked this, Butcher would have had his daddy come for my pension.”

“So you sold your soul to Chuck Butcher. You know this is why people say all cops are- bastards, right?”

“Listen, unlike some people, I’m not sitting on a pile of money from my ex. Okay? I don’t have any generational wealth. My pension is literally all the money I have in the world, and I have two more years till I can start collecting it. Nancy’s not in jail, by the way—she got the top defense attorney in the Commonwealth and got bailed out. There’s no way a jury is going to put her away for this.”

“Whatever helps you sleep at night,” Michelle said, turning away. “Don’t call me,” she tossed over her shoulder.

Williams sighed, closed the door, walked back to the solarium, and got back into pigeon pose.

*

Two weeks passed. Chuck Butcher got his landscaping replaced. Williams didn’t see Michelle around town. People had written a lot about the pitfalls of dating someone of another race and maybe not enough about the pitfalls of dating someone of another class. Dumb for him to think a rich woman, even one who worked as a teacher, could be a decent match.

His daughters signed him up for a dating app. It was depressing.

Nothing much happened in town. He broke up a party that seventeen-year-old Broderick Barrett was having in the north wing of the family home while his parents slept in the south wing. He drove out to the Callington house to question their cleaning lady after a brooch had gone missing, but Mrs. Callington met him at the door to say she’d found the brooch under the bed, it was all just a terrible misunderstanding, please don’t question Margarita, she might get her feelings hurt and quit, and you know how it’s hard to find good help these days.

He didn’t.

But he nodded at Mrs. Callington and got back into his car. Five minutes later, Trey hailed him on the radio. “It’s Butcher again, Chief,” Trey said.

Williams heaved a heavy sigh and drove out to Butcher’s house.

Butcher was even more livid this time. “I’m calling the state police first this time,” Butcher said. “I never should have trusted you. You clearly have no control over this town.”

“Sir,” Williams said, “I do not have the budget to place every citizen of this town with a grudge against you under surveillance. I arrested the seventy-year-old woman who vandalized your yard. What else would you have had me do? Summary execution on the town common to make an example of her?” Butcher’s eyes conveyed that he would indeed have preferred that. The State Police detectives arrived that afternoon.

Since Nancy’s arrest, the town had grown even less sympathetic to any efforts to solve Chuck Butcher’s problems. The state police were referred to attorneys by everyone they contacted and told they could get warrants if they wanted surveillance footage.

They wound up getting a handful of warrants out of spite, or perhaps because Daddy Butcher was up their ass. Whichever the case, the footage told a very similar story as last time. A black-clad figure had arrived at Butcher’s house with a Santa-Claus sized bag containing a sprayer and three gallons of bleach, which was an ample amount to kill all of Chuck Butcher’s plantings again. The figure had once again disappeared into the nature preserve.

Ted at Home Depot had gladly handed his footage over to the state police, but the vandal had presumably learned from Nancy’s mistake and not parked there. Such footage as they’d managed to obtain from around the nature preserve did not show anyone exiting until nine AM, when the crew of fitness walkers that had arrived at 7:30 made their way out, all clad in expensive athleisure wear.

Eventually the staties got the manpower to search the nature preserve. There they found the empty bleach bottles as well as a bucket with bleach covering a pair of formerly-black leggings,a formerly-black Kirkland sweatshirt, and a pair of formerly black Reeboks. So even if Daddy Butcher demanded DNA testing on the clothes, there’d be nothing to find. The bucket and bottles had also been wiped clean, not that too many residents of this town had fingerprints in the system.

Though, Williams thought, teachers did. Every public school teacher in the Commonwealth was fingerprinted.

But that was just a hunch, and one he certainly wasn’t going to share with the staties.

Eventually the staties left town, and Chuck Butcher followed soon after. Janine who sold real estate told Williams that the soil damage from the bleach had cost Chuck another hundred thousand bucks in reduced asking price for the house. Assuming he wasn’t full of shit about how much the plantings cost, that meant the town had taken Chuck Butcher for three hundred k.

Which was much, much less than he’d taken them for, but it was something, anyway.

Williams was picking up his oat milk latte at Boom, Roasted, the local coffee shop whose name had presumably been mildly amusing when The Office was still on TV, when Michelle walked in. Williams found this curious, since Michelle didn’t drink coffee.

To her credit, she didn’t try to pretend she hadn’t come here looking for him. She walked right up to him and said, “Chief?”

“Yes, Ms. Wrightson?” Williams said, since they were apparently back on formal terms.

“I wanted to apologize for the cruel things I said while I was upset,” she said.

Williams’ eyes were drawn to Michelle’s shoes, a pair of hot pink Hokas. Next to the bottom eyelet on the left shoe, there was a white spot.

Bleach.

It occurred to him that if he examined the footage of the fitness walkers entering the nature preserve, he would not have seen Michelle with them. But he had a feeling he would have seen her exit with them. But of course he hadn’t seen the footage. It’ wasn’t his investigation. And there were things he cared about less than Chuck Butcher’s dead flowers, but it was a short list.

Michelle followed Williams’ eyes down to her feet, then looked him defiantly in the eye.

He nodded at her shoe and smiled at her. “Thank you,” Williams said. “It was a pretty stressful time. Neither one of us was at our best. I’m sorry too, for what it’s worth.”

“It’s worth something,” Michelle said, smiling. “See you around.”

“I hope so,'“ Williams said.