The White Angel Murder

21

Stanton went into work early on Monday. Their unit meeting was scheduled for ten o’clock and he wanted to get a few hours of work in before that. The floor was empty except for a few offices that had their lights on and he found the silence relaxing as he went to his office and booted up his computer. While he waited for the monitor to warm up, he looked out to the passing traffic and was grateful he had the window.

He logged into the SDPD intranet using the password the administrator emailed him and went to the human resources tab. He found the file for Francisco Hernandez.

Francisco’s life was a story Stanton had heard before. He had grown up in a gang and had a record as a juvenile that he had gotten expunged. At nineteen he had pulled himself away from his gang life and joined the police department to help clean up the degradation of his neighborhood he must’ve seen. He didn’t graduate high school but finished his GED later in life and then an associate’s degree in criminal justice at a local city college when he was twenty-two.

His third year on the force, he was involved in a shooting. A young Mexican kid tried to shoot him when he had pulled him over for speeding. Francisco managed to fire two rounds before being run over by the car. After any officer involved shooting, it was standard procedure to have a visit with the precinct psychiatrist and have him write a psychological profile and clear the officer for duty. Stanton searched for the profile, but didn’t find it. It was confidential and wouldn’t be in the HR file.

He rose and went to Tommy’s office.

Tommy had his feet up on the desk and was talking softly on the phone. So softly in fact that Stanton had thought he wasn’t in. He sat down across from him and waited. Tommy made a motion of one minute and then continued to speak. He appeared to be placing an order for something but when the conversation was done he said, “Love you.”

“I need a favor, Tommy.”

“So soon?”

Stanton threw an envelope with five thousand in cash on the desk. “That should buy me one favor I think.”

“What happened?”

“I saved the department some scratch. Like I said, I think it buys me one favor.”

“Depends what the favor is.”

“I need the psych profile for a detective.”

Tommy stared at him a moment and then burst out in laughter. “Can’t you ever ask for a credit card to buy gas or a new gun or something like that?”

“I don’t need those things. I need a psych profile.”

“Why? Oh wait, let me guess, you can’t tell me?”

“I could but I prefer not to.”

“Well, indulge me, Detective. Please.”

“I want to find something I can use to convince the detective to give me the information I need.”

“You mean blackmail?”

“No, I don’t. Just something that can give me some insight into him.”

“That’s out there. Even for you. What’s going on?”

Stanton looked out the window. The building across the street had construction crews on the roof and they were standing around in the morning sunlight, two of them hard at work and the others laughing and joking.

“I can’t get this girl out of my head, Tommy. She came here looking for a new start because her life back home was so messed up. What she found instead was the grim reaper waiting for her in her apartment one Wednesday night. She was twenty-three, a kid, and she went through just about as much pain as a human being can go through before she died. She deserves something for that, Tommy. She deserves me to get this guy.”

Tommy thought about what he said and then straightened up in his chair. “You’ve always had a way with words. Who’s the detective?”

“Francisco Hernandez. He’s in Vice.”

“We could both lose our jobs for this. You know that, right?”

“Yes.”

“But, we’re going to do it anyway, aren’t we?”

“Yes.”

*****

Francisco’s profile was there in less than two hours. It came in paper form with instructions from Tommy to shred the document afterward and never mention it to anyone again. It was two pages long and Stanton knew the psychiatrist had not been paying attention. It was a paycheck to him; process as many cops as possible and get them out as quickly as possible.

The profile talked about issues with authority and antisocial tendencies. One section spoke about prior drug use, marijuana, but didn’t go into details. It was in the second to last paragraph of the second page that Stanton found what he was looking for: Subject transferred from the Sex Crimes Unit after two weeks due to his inability to separate current caseload with the sexual assault suffered by his younger sister to which he was privy.

He felt a twinge of guilt in his belly, but he thought about Tami in her bloodied bed and chose the lesser of two evils. He left the building as the rest of the unit was assembling for the mandatory Monday morning meeting.