Ashes to Ashes (34 page)

“Okay,” Oscar stated. “What do you think it
means?”

“Drugs? I was right about thinking on that
angle?”

“To a point,” Oscar said, taking another sip
of the hot black liquid.

“What
is
that
, Oscar?” Ashe
asked, pointing again at the black and gold container. “What
exactly does that mean? Ginger has already given me an idea of what
the pill that was inside that container involves. Strange
ingredients. Amphetamines. Severe symptoms. Paranoia. Aggression.
Possible hallucinations or delusions…based on my own findings
during my
little investigation
. There is a phenomenon known
as Amphetamine Psychosis, wherein the person expresses these
symptoms. Sense of reality is distorted by this mental disruption.
It seems to fit the picture, I believe.”

“It brings other possible players into the
game,” Oscar told him.

“Steven Reynolds?”

Oscar cocked his eyebrow. “Hell no. You need
to get that man out of your mind. He is nowhere near this.”

“Then who?”

During the conversation between Ashe and
Oscar, Ginger had been silently eating fried food and drinking
coffee, waiting for the moment he could chime back in. At Ashe’s
question, his ears seemed to perk up and he had to rejoin the
chatter. “Organized crime.” He giggled. “And the criminals involved
in that organized crime.”

“All of them?” Ashe asked, unsure of what
Ginger was speak of. “I find that unlikely.”

“What the lab rat is trying to say is that
this here container has only been found at scenes loosely dealing
with organized crime,” Oscar said. He picked the container off of
the café’s table. “We have three distinct and unique crime scenes
where this plain-Jane container has been found. One where we
actually turned up an intact pill. There was little to nothing to
connect the scenes…except for this.” He pulled the container in
toward his eyes and began to inspect and possibly admire it. “The
first one was the massacre at the public library two years
ago.”

“The Picante family?” Ashe asked. “I saw it
on the news. I don’t remember the exact details. A gunman attacked
the family during some kind of secret meeting at the back of the
library?”

“The gunman had worked for the family,” Oscar
elaborated. “Charlie Parker. A bodyguard for the head member of the
family, even. Luis Picante had swore by the man and had been quoted
as saying that he trusted the man with his life. He had trusted the
man right up until the day Charlie shot him in the face. Charlie
Parker then went on to gun down the remaining members of the
family, before fleeing from the building. He still has not been
caught. Witnesses and video surveillance had identified him as the
killer.”

“Motive?” Ashe asked.

“The man went crazy,” Ginger said.

“No,” Oscar corrected. “People don’t just go
crazy. I’ve never believed that.”

“Then what?” Ashe asked.

“The librarian said that she had heard what
sounded like a confrontation between Charlie Parker and the
family,” Oscar said. “It had not been cold blooded and calculated.
The librarian had told us that she could have sworn that the gunman
sounded scared, as if he had been reacting to a threat. It was like
he had been confronting a threat with force. But Charlie Parker had
been the only person armed with any type of weapon. Why had he felt
threatened?”

“Odd,” Ginger stated.

“Where did you find the container?” Ashe
asked.

“At the suspect’s apartment,” Oscar replied.
“Once he was identified, we raided his home but he was long gone.
We found the container on the coffee table of the living room. It
had just been lying there. Empty. We had no idea at that time what
it might have meant.”

“Any motive turn up during the
investigation?”

“Nothing solid,” Oscar admitted. “It could
have been a lot of things. Nothing stood out.”

“What was the second situation?”

“Young Matty Windham,” Ginger replied to
Ashe’s question. He turned his eyes to his empty plate in disgust.
Before Ashe or Oscar could say anything or add anything to his
response, Ginger waved over the server for another refill on his
coffee. Reaching past Oscar, he added his usual load of creamer and
sugar.

Ashe turned away from Ginger, after waiting
for him to elaborate. Looking at Oscar, Ashe arched his eyebrows in
question. “Who is Matty Windham?”

“A teenager who murdered his father and
disabled his mother with a hammer,” Oscar said. “He had apparently
snuck into the garage in the middle of the night and took his dads
hammer from his tool box. While they slept, he took the hammer to
his father’s head before moving on to the mother. The mother
managed to fight him off but not before he hit her one good time in
the eye, blinding her in that eye for life. During the struggle,
the mother managed to kill Mathew with the same hammer he had come
at them with. You probably would better recognize the name, Ashe,
if he had lived. Sure he would have been tried as an adult and sent
to Wilson. He would have been in your chair. No doubt in my
mind.”

“What motive could he have had to attack his
parents like that?” Ashe asked. “You said they had been attacked in
their beds? Sounds like the same way Scott killed Owen.” He pointed
out the similarities between Owen’s death and Mathew’s assault on
his parents, but he didn’t mention Franklin Barrett. Not yet,
anyway.

Oscar cocked his head slightly.
“Coincidence,” he replied and shrugged it off.

“And there was no identifiable connection to
the Picante murders?” Ashe questioned, already having been told the
answer. “But you did find that container. Obviously.” He took the
moment to reach over to Oscar and take the container from him. He
began to play with it, slide it across his fingers. It was so
little and appeared harmless. What secrets did it hold? And why was
Scott involved?

Oscar nodded.

The server arrived with Oscar’s plate of
food.

“In his high school back pack,” Oscar said,
once the server was out of hearing range. “It was tucked into one
of the side pouches.”

Ashe let the details sink in.

“But when I say there is little to connect
the crimes, you know, besides the container,” Oscar began, his
mouth full of chips, “that is not completely true. Organized crime
connects them, as Ginger has told you. But that is all the
connection we have come across…the thin definition of organized
crime.”

“What did Mathew Windham have to do with
organized crime?” Ashe asked. “His parents where in it, somehow,
weren’t they.”

“Yes,” Oscar replied. “But nothing big. The
father, Thomas Windham, was a cop.”

“A cop? How do I not know the name?” Ashe
wondered.

“You do,” Oscar blurted, surprising Ashe.
“Only no one ever called him Thomas or Tom. He went by other
names.”

Realization came to the psychologist.
“Tommy-on-the-take. I didn’t know he was killed. Where have I been
the past few years?”

“You needed to get away,” Oscar told him.
“I’m sorry that you are getting brought back into this world.”

“I’ve never left the world of killers,
Oscar,” Ashe said. “And you know it.”

Oscar grunted.

“Tommy-on-the-take,” Ginger mumbled from
whatever world he had been in for the past few minutes.
“Tommy-on-the-take was a dirty rotten shame of a cop. Always on the
take for whatever he could get. Dirty. Dirty. Dirty shame of a
man.”

“But you could never prove it, though,” Ashe
said.

Oscar agreed with the statement. “Never could
find any evidence. But everyone knew he was in the pocket of some
serious guys.”

“The Picante family?”

“They were never in question, that we could
tell,” Oscar replied. “But who knows. Circumstantial at best. But
that life never had to do with Mathew. And it was him who committed
the crime.”

Ashe nodded. That was true.

“And Matty was never part of any crime
family,” Ginger added. “The container had a small dusting, just
like the one you got from Scott’s bedroom. We matched the substance
to what was in Mathew’s blood stream. It was hard to find…but I am
that good, my friend.”

“Are you done gloating?” Oscar asked
Ginger.

“Yes, sir,” he replied.

Ashe just watched the exchange. There was a
strange relationship between the cops and the lab, as it always has
been between religion and science. To a lot of police officers, law
enforcement was not just a duty but a religion, one that was based
on gut instincts and faith in both the system and the god that
protects them from the bad guys. While the lab relied on studies
and experiments, the hard science that made the evidence speak to
them. Religion and science, was an age old squabble. However,
within law enforcement, it had become a friendship as well, no
longer trapped in the dark ages. Crime investigation embraces that
line where the two positions, religion and science, could merge and
blend and fill in where the other one falls short. It was a true
dream team.

He noticed that the rain had stopped but the
clouds refused to break up.

“And the third situation?” Ashe asked.

Ginger sighed. The sound was not good to
Ashe’s ears, reminding him of a whining horse when it had broken a
leg and was about to put down.

“That bad?” Ashe inquired. “It couldn’t be
much worse than Mathew Windham.”

“Not worse in brutality,” Oscar said. “But it
was worse in scope. I know that you know this one. Everyone knows
this one. Women and children gunned down…all to get at three
brothers. The gunman drove by an opened fire on the entire
building.”

“At a church,” Ashe said, remembering the
story. It was awful. “St. Anthony of the Angels on E. Wood Street.
Nine people dead, including twin toddlers who were sitting with
their father in the back pew. Several others were seriously
injured. Including other children. It was all over the news.”
Anytime a child dies, something inside of Ashe…dies? He didn’t know
if that was the right word to describe what happened to him, but it
was close enough. What took place inside of him whenever a child
was needlessly affected by violence was hard to describe in
civilized and structured language. Emotions stirred. Ones he forgot
that he had. They were guttural and instinctual feelings that were
at his core, possibly at the core of everyone. No. Not everyone.
Not everyone had those instincts. If they did…no child would have
to suffer.

“I still think about it,” Oscar admitted.

“I don’t remember hearing about any target,
though,” Ashe said. “What three brothers was the man after?”

“The Cool brothers,” Oscar told him. “Joe,
Johnny, and Jimmy.”

“The gun runners? They are petty
criminals…from what I remember. A few unproven homicides to their
heads. Mostly other low-life criminal types. They were never
mentioned in the news,” Ashe said. “Why?”

“No reason to,” Ginger conveyed. “Nothing
could tie them to the shooting, at least nothing short of hunches.
And the later confession of the gunman. Victor Ortiz.”

“Victor Ortiz?”

Oscar took the reins and continued. “We
located Victor Ortiz a few days later and he was arrested as being
the gunman. He confessed to the shooting and to the targets being
the Cool brothers. Wouldn’t tell us why.”

“I don’t remember a gunman being caught,”
Ashe admitted. “Victor Ortiz? Was he also put in Wilson?”

“Not Wilson. No,” Oscar replied. “He never
made it to trial. Hung himself or was hung in lock-up the day after
confessing. Suicide? Evidence said so. I have my doubts. He left
the Cool brothers alive and I think they found out the bullets were
aimed at them.”

“Sounds possible,” Ashe concurred.

The food was long gone but the coffee still
flowed hot. Ashe and Oscar stuck with black while Ginger continued
to water his down with sugar and cream. And it continued to be
blasphemy.

“Where did you find the container?” Ashe
wanted to know.

“On him,” Oscar said. “He had two containers
on him, for some reason. Never could figure it out. One of them
still had a full pill. It was a move in the right direction. Or so
we thought. But the trail on the pill went cold, completely for the
past year.”

“Not really,” Ashe told him, grabbing the
detective’s attention.

“How do you mean?” Oscar inquired.

Ashe placed the black and gold container as
the middle of the table. “Did you find a container on Franklin
Barrett?”

Chapter 40

“What the hell are you doing, Scott?” Bam
exclaimed, her hands a blur of motions and expressions. Her face
was red and spittle flew from her mouth. “You weren’t supposed to
abduct him. You were supposed to grab the pills from him and then
leave. This is insanity! This is fucking nuts! Scott! Scott! What
is going through your brain?”

Adrenaline still pushed its way around
Scott’s body, causing his heart to pound and his skin to tingle. He
had never felt more alive in his entire life, even on the
basketball court. “I no longer know what is going through my head,
hun,” Scott told her. “Do you? I guess…questions. Questions are
going through my head, Bam. Do know what went through our head when
we took that pill? Don’t you want to know what happened? And why?
Don’t you want to know the truth?”

“I know what happened,” she replied.

“It was not God!” Scott yelled.

“You don’t know that,” Bam demanded. She put
her back to him and began to look out the kitchen window. It was
still daytime but the cloudy sky made it almost as dark as night.
The rain had stopped but the gray clouds still hung across the sky.
It was like a blanket but instead of keeping everything warm and
cozy, the damp clouds made everything wet and cold.

Scott replied to her. “My father once told me
that God was a construct invented by people because human beings
wanted desperately to believe they are unique in the world. They
want to know they are special, so they need a creator, a loving
father that will never let them down, never abandon them if they
are good and holy. There are a lot of people that need that
infallible father. And even when God does hurt them, and he does
often, it is for their own good. What a perfect father. Huh?”