guerillacropoli
02-09-2009, 01:46 AM
By John Beechem a.k.a. "Guerillacropoli"
Detective Ryu Murikami casts his shadow upon an unidentified male corpse that was found in an alleyway off 3rd Ave. in the Central District. The CD, as it is referred to by its residents, has had its ups and downs recently. Despite the recent wave of juvenile gang violence, property values are up. Rising rent in downtown Seattle and several of the traditional white neighborhoods has caused a wave of new residents to flood the area. The slowly forming gentrification was granting the CD an air of respectability, a low rent neighborhood close to downtown, but now open for whites.
The only blemish against the neighborhood was a rising homicide rate among teenagers. Three had been killed in a recent weekend, including a rare gang shootout in a local shopping mall. The homicide unit had been under an enormous amount of pressure to solve the murder, and solve it they did. Although not the primary investigator in the mall shooting, Murikami had the intuition to request a print analysis of every paper cup within fifteen feet of the scene. True enough, the crime lab came up with a match on a 19 year old with a juvenile assault record, Reggie McGraw. Friends and family confirmed Reggie had planned to go to the mall that night and hadn’t seen him since. Detective Murikami suspected he’d fled, and they put out an APB up and down the West Coast. Miraculously, the suspect had been arrested in a dramatic Portland drug raid. Reggie was armed at the time of his arrest, and because of the APB, was extradited back to Seattle along with his weapon. Ballistics matched shots to the mall shooting victim to Reggie’s gun.
Murikami’s fellow homicide detective, Jamal Henderson, the primary investigator in the mall shooting, went into the interrogation room armed with knowledge of the ballistics report, the crime scene, and his suspect. Henderson was an intimidating force in the interrogation room. At 6’6”, his two-hundred fifty pound frame was itself an implied threat of violence. His booming voice only added to the effect. Although the interrogation room was designed to be sound proof, you could hear a muffled tirade coming from him even when the mic was turned off. In fifteen minutes, Henderson had convinced Reggie to sign a confession. In three months, the suspect was sentenced to twenty-five years for Murder Two. Even though the detectives wanted Murder One, it had been clear from witnesses the victim had provoked Reggie with gang signs and trash talk. The shots fired proved to be the fatal insult, but the District Attorney couldn’t prove pre-meditation, a requirement for 1st degree murder. Twenty-five years meant out in seven to ten for good behavior. Reggie would be back on the streets while still in his twenties, and unless he left Seattle, the likely result would be that his body would be found in another alleyway shortly after his release.
Even though Henderson got credit for the clearance, everyone knew it was Murikami’s print request that had pushed the case through. The victim’s name went from red to black on “the big board,” a fixture in every homicide office with the names of victims listed under the names of the detectives who had been assigned to investigate their deaths. With the murder solved, Homicide’s universe marched one step closer to harmony.
Murikami didn’t care that he wasn’t formally recognized for his contribution to the case. He enjoyed letting Henderson get his time in the sun. It was Henderson, after all, who’d raced to Portland, and with the department’s blessing, participated in the drug house raid that nabbed Reggie. He also succeeded in getting a quick confession. Still, his clearance rate was nowhere near Murikami’s, and although a good detective, would never manage to approach his friend’s nearly unheard of ninety-four percent solve rate.
Murikami and Henderson were unofficial police partners. The only minorities in an otherwise white unit, they exhibited a yin yang partnership. Murikami was flexible, adaptable, and endlessly clever. He had a 160 I.Q. and an uncanny knack for psychological profiling. Cold and analytical, he was a quiet but forceful presence. Henderson was his opposite, a force of fury, and always under the surface, pure violence. Henderson had once shot an entire squad of L.A. Crips who had moved up to the city for what they viewed as untapped territory. One had been foolish enough to take a shot at Henderson during a gang related murder investigation. Henderson had mowed them all down, even the one’s who had not yet pulled their weapons. Although Murikami had not fired a shot in years, he respected his friend’s smoldering fury and acknowledged that he may have saved their lives that night.
As Murikami calculates trajectories in a notebook based on what ballistics he can gather at the scene, he sees Henderson approach. In the bright light of the sunrise, only his silhouette is visible, but no one else could match that massive frame. As Murikami calculates a trigonometry equation he has formed from the evidence, Henderson speaks up.
“*******, they weren’t ****ing around with this guy.” It is an understatement. Murikami has counted six entrance wounds. When the Medical Examiner comes, they can flip him and fish for bullets.
Henderson puts on a pair of latex, powder-free surgical gloves and takes the murder weapon from the victim’s waistband. “Mother****er had the safety on. No wonder he got capped.”
The street banter is a joke with Henderson, a way to break the tension of an investigation. Murikami smiles, barely.
“No, not a good tactic, I agree. Do you notice the powder streaks near the end of the barrel? Count the bullets in the clip. Even though he had the safety on, this gun looks like it’s been fired recently. That must mean the victim felt he was safe. Maybe the murderer was a member of his crew? Some kind of disagreement about a drug debt?”
“Hell of a disagreement,” Henderson replies. “But you’re right; the clip holds twelve but there’s only nine in here. The chamber’s clear. This guy shot off three and hasn’t reloaded.”
“Weren’t there three shots fired in Giduigli’s victim?” Murikami asks.
“Yeah, I think so,” Henderson replies.
“I’ll tell the lab to run it through ballistics it and match it against Giduigli’s,” says Murikami. “What was he? Seventeen? Yeah, that’s right. And this one’s sixteen.”
“That’s ****ed up. Back in my day, we’d throw fists, at least for most of it. Kids these days…”
* * * * *
The ballistics come up a match. For two recent cases, Murikami solves another detective’s case. Giduigli gets a clearance without so much as an arrest. He takes Murikami out for a beer, an Asahi it turns out.
The problem is Murikami doesn’t have much of a lead in his new case. However, they’ve discovered something strange in the victim’s physiology. His torso has a strange burn scar on it, even though nothing about it shows up in the kid’s medical history. That was to be expected. When they had analyzed the victim’s prints, they had I.D.’d him. His name was Tyrone Walker. He’d spent time in juvie for dealing dime bags and petty theft. Not quite a gang banger. He’d also only sporadically been with health insurance, so it was no surprise he hadn’t gotten treated for the burn. The strange thing was its pattern. His favorite M.E., Wendy Barlow, explains it to him.
“It’s not the pattern you’d get from gasoline or acid poured on you. It’s a scorch mark. I don’t know how it got so big though. No fires at any past residences. One of the old timers says he saw wounds like that in ‘Nam, but they were from flamethrowers.”
Murikami looks down at Wendy’s small frame. Her youth conceals a kind of pure professionalism. She reminds Ryu Murikami of his daughter. “I hope none of the criminals in our city are armed with flamethrowers. They don’t cover that in the field manual.”
Wendy cracks a smile. “Very funny, Ryu.”
He is taken aback by the intimacy created from hearing his first name. These days, only his wife refers to him as “Ryu.”
“Do me a favor, Ms. Barlow,” Murikami says, subtly rebuffing the woman’s gentle flirtation. “Examine all of the other autopsies of homicide victims aged nineteen and under conducted in the past year. See if any of them mention burn scars. Can you do that on your computer?”
“Sure thing.” Barlow scoots her rolling stool away from the body and towards a laptop resting on an empty examination table. She puts in the parameters that Murikami requested, and pulls up the files. There are two. One is Jibari Miller. He had healed 2nd degree burns, but his father had been jailed for arson. The next, however, was another mystery. Deandrae Price, 18, had scars on his thighs and buttocks, also in the strange scorch mark pattern. Even more mysterious, despite his insured status since age two, Deandrae had never been treated for burns. In Murikami’s mind, that meant gang connection. Gang members usually bribed local, gang friendly doctors with cash so that shootings and other wounds inflicted couldn’t be traced through medical records. Somebody, Murikami realizes, is burning victims. Burning victims before he shoots them.
Murikami thanks Barlow and makes his way up to the Homicide Unit. He looks up Deandrae Price’s high school and calls the Resource Officer assigned to them. Deandrae was a senior at Garfield High School when he was shot, and his classmates will be graduating in four months. He asks the R.O. to bring any known gang members into his office. They’d talk to him at school, or go downtown for an interrogation. The R.O. agrees, and Murikami requests a black Chevrolet Camaro, a gift from the taxpayers. He also flags down Henderson and convinces him to come along. With two detectives, the questioning will only take half as long.
“Shit, I thought I’d never have to go back to the principal’s office,” Henderson quips.
“No, it’ll be in the R.O.’s office. The administration doesn’t know we’re coming.”
“Let’s hope they don’t find out.”
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Detective Ryu Murikami casts his shadow upon an unidentified male corpse that was found in an alleyway off 3rd Ave. in the Central District. The CD, as it is referred to by its residents, has had its ups and downs recently. Despite the recent wave of juvenile gang violence, property values are up. Rising rent in downtown Seattle and several of the traditional white neighborhoods has caused a wave of new residents to flood the area. The slowly forming gentrification was granting the CD an air of respectability, a low rent neighborhood close to downtown, but now open for whites.
The only blemish against the neighborhood was a rising homicide rate among teenagers. Three had been killed in a recent weekend, including a rare gang shootout in a local shopping mall. The homicide unit had been under an enormous amount of pressure to solve the murder, and solve it they did. Although not the primary investigator in the mall shooting, Murikami had the intuition to request a print analysis of every paper cup within fifteen feet of the scene. True enough, the crime lab came up with a match on a 19 year old with a juvenile assault record, Reggie McGraw. Friends and family confirmed Reggie had planned to go to the mall that night and hadn’t seen him since. Detective Murikami suspected he’d fled, and they put out an APB up and down the West Coast. Miraculously, the suspect had been arrested in a dramatic Portland drug raid. Reggie was armed at the time of his arrest, and because of the APB, was extradited back to Seattle along with his weapon. Ballistics matched shots to the mall shooting victim to Reggie’s gun.
Murikami’s fellow homicide detective, Jamal Henderson, the primary investigator in the mall shooting, went into the interrogation room armed with knowledge of the ballistics report, the crime scene, and his suspect. Henderson was an intimidating force in the interrogation room. At 6’6”, his two-hundred fifty pound frame was itself an implied threat of violence. His booming voice only added to the effect. Although the interrogation room was designed to be sound proof, you could hear a muffled tirade coming from him even when the mic was turned off. In fifteen minutes, Henderson had convinced Reggie to sign a confession. In three months, the suspect was sentenced to twenty-five years for Murder Two. Even though the detectives wanted Murder One, it had been clear from witnesses the victim had provoked Reggie with gang signs and trash talk. The shots fired proved to be the fatal insult, but the District Attorney couldn’t prove pre-meditation, a requirement for 1st degree murder. Twenty-five years meant out in seven to ten for good behavior. Reggie would be back on the streets while still in his twenties, and unless he left Seattle, the likely result would be that his body would be found in another alleyway shortly after his release.
Even though Henderson got credit for the clearance, everyone knew it was Murikami’s print request that had pushed the case through. The victim’s name went from red to black on “the big board,” a fixture in every homicide office with the names of victims listed under the names of the detectives who had been assigned to investigate their deaths. With the murder solved, Homicide’s universe marched one step closer to harmony.
Murikami didn’t care that he wasn’t formally recognized for his contribution to the case. He enjoyed letting Henderson get his time in the sun. It was Henderson, after all, who’d raced to Portland, and with the department’s blessing, participated in the drug house raid that nabbed Reggie. He also succeeded in getting a quick confession. Still, his clearance rate was nowhere near Murikami’s, and although a good detective, would never manage to approach his friend’s nearly unheard of ninety-four percent solve rate.
Murikami and Henderson were unofficial police partners. The only minorities in an otherwise white unit, they exhibited a yin yang partnership. Murikami was flexible, adaptable, and endlessly clever. He had a 160 I.Q. and an uncanny knack for psychological profiling. Cold and analytical, he was a quiet but forceful presence. Henderson was his opposite, a force of fury, and always under the surface, pure violence. Henderson had once shot an entire squad of L.A. Crips who had moved up to the city for what they viewed as untapped territory. One had been foolish enough to take a shot at Henderson during a gang related murder investigation. Henderson had mowed them all down, even the one’s who had not yet pulled their weapons. Although Murikami had not fired a shot in years, he respected his friend’s smoldering fury and acknowledged that he may have saved their lives that night.
As Murikami calculates trajectories in a notebook based on what ballistics he can gather at the scene, he sees Henderson approach. In the bright light of the sunrise, only his silhouette is visible, but no one else could match that massive frame. As Murikami calculates a trigonometry equation he has formed from the evidence, Henderson speaks up.
“*******, they weren’t ****ing around with this guy.” It is an understatement. Murikami has counted six entrance wounds. When the Medical Examiner comes, they can flip him and fish for bullets.
Henderson puts on a pair of latex, powder-free surgical gloves and takes the murder weapon from the victim’s waistband. “Mother****er had the safety on. No wonder he got capped.”
The street banter is a joke with Henderson, a way to break the tension of an investigation. Murikami smiles, barely.
“No, not a good tactic, I agree. Do you notice the powder streaks near the end of the barrel? Count the bullets in the clip. Even though he had the safety on, this gun looks like it’s been fired recently. That must mean the victim felt he was safe. Maybe the murderer was a member of his crew? Some kind of disagreement about a drug debt?”
“Hell of a disagreement,” Henderson replies. “But you’re right; the clip holds twelve but there’s only nine in here. The chamber’s clear. This guy shot off three and hasn’t reloaded.”
“Weren’t there three shots fired in Giduigli’s victim?” Murikami asks.
“Yeah, I think so,” Henderson replies.
“I’ll tell the lab to run it through ballistics it and match it against Giduigli’s,” says Murikami. “What was he? Seventeen? Yeah, that’s right. And this one’s sixteen.”
“That’s ****ed up. Back in my day, we’d throw fists, at least for most of it. Kids these days…”
* * * * *
The ballistics come up a match. For two recent cases, Murikami solves another detective’s case. Giduigli gets a clearance without so much as an arrest. He takes Murikami out for a beer, an Asahi it turns out.
The problem is Murikami doesn’t have much of a lead in his new case. However, they’ve discovered something strange in the victim’s physiology. His torso has a strange burn scar on it, even though nothing about it shows up in the kid’s medical history. That was to be expected. When they had analyzed the victim’s prints, they had I.D.’d him. His name was Tyrone Walker. He’d spent time in juvie for dealing dime bags and petty theft. Not quite a gang banger. He’d also only sporadically been with health insurance, so it was no surprise he hadn’t gotten treated for the burn. The strange thing was its pattern. His favorite M.E., Wendy Barlow, explains it to him.
“It’s not the pattern you’d get from gasoline or acid poured on you. It’s a scorch mark. I don’t know how it got so big though. No fires at any past residences. One of the old timers says he saw wounds like that in ‘Nam, but they were from flamethrowers.”
Murikami looks down at Wendy’s small frame. Her youth conceals a kind of pure professionalism. She reminds Ryu Murikami of his daughter. “I hope none of the criminals in our city are armed with flamethrowers. They don’t cover that in the field manual.”
Wendy cracks a smile. “Very funny, Ryu.”
He is taken aback by the intimacy created from hearing his first name. These days, only his wife refers to him as “Ryu.”
“Do me a favor, Ms. Barlow,” Murikami says, subtly rebuffing the woman’s gentle flirtation. “Examine all of the other autopsies of homicide victims aged nineteen and under conducted in the past year. See if any of them mention burn scars. Can you do that on your computer?”
“Sure thing.” Barlow scoots her rolling stool away from the body and towards a laptop resting on an empty examination table. She puts in the parameters that Murikami requested, and pulls up the files. There are two. One is Jibari Miller. He had healed 2nd degree burns, but his father had been jailed for arson. The next, however, was another mystery. Deandrae Price, 18, had scars on his thighs and buttocks, also in the strange scorch mark pattern. Even more mysterious, despite his insured status since age two, Deandrae had never been treated for burns. In Murikami’s mind, that meant gang connection. Gang members usually bribed local, gang friendly doctors with cash so that shootings and other wounds inflicted couldn’t be traced through medical records. Somebody, Murikami realizes, is burning victims. Burning victims before he shoots them.
Murikami thanks Barlow and makes his way up to the Homicide Unit. He looks up Deandrae Price’s high school and calls the Resource Officer assigned to them. Deandrae was a senior at Garfield High School when he was shot, and his classmates will be graduating in four months. He asks the R.O. to bring any known gang members into his office. They’d talk to him at school, or go downtown for an interrogation. The R.O. agrees, and Murikami requests a black Chevrolet Camaro, a gift from the taxpayers. He also flags down Henderson and convinces him to come along. With two detectives, the questioning will only take half as long.
“Shit, I thought I’d never have to go back to the principal’s office,” Henderson quips.
“No, it’ll be in the R.O.’s office. The administration doesn’t know we’re coming.”
“Let’s hope they don’t find out.”
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