Solved……………………………………………………………………………….………………………………….Kevin Simmons, V

Solved

Kevin Simmons '23

One thing that I pride myself on is my ability to solve puzzles and mysteries that nobody else can. This talent is what made me put on the badge. It’s what got me all of those promotions over the years. More than once, I’ve seen the whole precinct giving me a standing ovation for a job well done; I had found the kidnapped kid, or stopped the serial killer, or something. Countless times I saw my picture on the wall of the department, with the words, “Sean Gorman, Detective of the Year,” printed under it. It all becomes the same thing after so many years, it all blends together. The years feel like they’ve all disappeared from my life. Time just vanished, case after case, murder scene after murder scene, clue after clue. I’ve seen more corpses in my career than I could count, so many that I barely even care when I see a dismembered victim on the floor. I hardly even remember why I became a cop in the first place. I’m sure that the naive, innocent, 20 year old me was raving on about “making the world a better place” or some such nonsense as he applied to the academy, but 40 years later, I feel like I haven’t made any impact at all in the grand scheme of things.

A file getting slapped on my desk snapped me out of my moping. My eyes flicked up from my desk to the bright eyes of my new partner, Mike. I say “new partner,” but Mike has been my partner for the better part of a year now. He was pretty much fresh out of the academy when I first met him, and we were partners shortly after. I thought it was funny, that to him it probably seems like ages since we became partners, but to me, it’s gone by in the blink of an eye.

“Come on, old man, we’ve got a case,” he said, picking up his keys and wallet from his paper-strewn desk energetically. He stopped, saw that I had not moved yet, and sighed at me. “Stop daydreaming and get moving, we’ve got a crime scene to get to.”

I grunted out of my desk chair and grumbled, “Yeah, yeah. I’m coming.” As I stood up, pain flared through my knees, which I promptly ignored. I was beginning to really feel my age these last few years. From bad knees, to a sore back, to the start of arthritis in my fingers, I was finding it harder and harder to get around. Seeing Mike buzz around me everywhere we go only highlights these changes for me.

I followed as he strode through the boisterous station out to the parking lot, where I spotted his car. We hopped in and I asked, “So what do we know about the situation?”

“Not much right now,” He said as he backed the car out of its parking spot. “Two victims murdered in their house, a boy and his father.”

“And the mother?” I asked him.

“Apparently she died four years ago,” Mike said, shrugging as he turned onto the street, following his GPS. “It was some type of disease, the doctors couldn’t figure out what it was exactly. She died after two months in the hospital.”

“Did you hear anything else about it?” I said to him.

“No that was it,” He said. “We’ll know more once we get on the scene.”

We drove for a minute or two in silence before Mike turned on the radio. He flipped around the channels until he came to a sports station, saying “Providence faces off against Villanova tonight in the Big East tournament…”

Mike chimed in over the noise of the radio, saying, “Didn’t you tell me that your daughter goes to Providence one time? Jessica, right?”

“Oh… Yeah, Jessica did go to Providence,” I said, caught off guard by the sudden mention of my family. “She graduated about four years ago.”

“What does she do now?” He asked me. “Does she still live around here?”

“No, she lives down in Florida now,” I responded. I have tried my best not to think of her as much as possible these last couple of years. Ever since she moved away, she seemed to have distanced herself from me. She’s harder to talk to, and I hardly ever get a hold of her on the phone. It had been months since I had last spoken to her. “I hear she’s getting married pretty soon.”

“Oh, good for her,” Mike said. I knew that he was only trying to learn more about me and make conversation, but I was beginning to get mad at Mike for asking about such a touchy subject. “When’s the wedding? Is it down in Florida?”

“It’s in a couple of months, in June,” I said, with a slight tone of annoyance. What I didn’t tell Mike was that I still hadn’t received an invitation to the wedding. Nothing, I hadn’t gotten any indication from Jessica that I was invited. She wasn’t even the one who told me about the wedding, I heard it from her childhood friend who still lives up here. But I calmed myself after that; there was no way for Mike to know why I was angry with him, so I forced that tone out of my voice. “It’ll be down in Florida.”

“Ah, that’ll be fun,” Mike said. “Well, if she ever comes up to visit, you should bring her around. I’d love to meet her.” After that, we rode in silence for the rest of the drive, with only the sports radio making any noise.

We pulled up in front of a small yellow house with a little, weedy front yard. I walked up the cracked front walkway with Mike in tow, and pushed the door open to see the scene. The first thing to hit me was the stench of it, it was like my nostrils were burning from the inside. I suppressed the urge to gag and continued in. I stepped into the living room, and through a small group of kneeling cops, I could see a stain of blood on the wall. We approached the group and Mike asked, “What are we looking at here?”

One of the cops turned around and looked us over, and I could see by the nametag on his uniform that his name was Jones. “Two victims,” He said. “One is right here in the living room, and the other is over in the kitchen. Both seem to have been killed with a knife, but they were both heavily mutilated.” He stepped to the side to reveal what looked like a scene out of a horror movie. The first victim was a man lying against the wall, covered in blood. Half of his face was pretty much hacked off, and there was a slice through his torso, with his intestines spilling out. Again, I felt a gag welling up inside me, and I had to stifle it. “They’ve likely been here for a few days now,” Jones continued. “That’s why it smells so foul in here.”

“Do we have a murder weapon?” I asked.

“No, we haven’t found anything matching the wounds,” He responded. “From the cuts on the bodies, we’re probably looking for a kitchen knife, or a blade of a similar size to a kitchen knife.” Another cop tapped Jones on his shoulder and said something to him. Jones nodded and the other cop continued on. Jones turned back to me and said, “I’ve gotta keep helping the rest of the guy with the crime scene. Good luck with this one, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of clues to go on.”

“Thanks,” Mike responded, and then he turned to me. “Well, I guess we’d better have a look at the other victim. Come on.” He continued through the living room, carefully stepping over tipped-over furniture and bloodstains on the carpet, and made his way into the kitchen.

This room was even worse than the last. The first thing I saw was a thick streak of blood smeared across the tile floor, leading to the body of a boy, lying face down on the floor next to the kitchen counter. “Looks like he started crawling away after he was stabbed,” said Mike. “The killer didn’t kill him right away, he just left him bleeding to death.” He got the attention of one of the other cops and asked, “What kind of wounds does this one have?”

“Just one stab wound, in the stomach,” The cop responded.

I looked again to the boy, and then to the counter above him, which had a phone sitting on it. “Looks like he might’ve been reaching for the phone there,” I said. And my eyes scoured the rest of the counter, until I landed on the knife block on the counter; completely filled, except for one slot. “I think Jones was right on that kitchen knife guess.”

“Yeah, one missing,” Mike muttered, with his eyebrows scrunched. I’ve learned in my time working with him that Mike is extremely good at putting together the pieces of a crime scene. He gets there and just stands in the middle of it all, and doesn’t talk for a few minutes. His eyes glance around at the floor and the walls and everything in between, and he scrunches his brow in thought, the way that he was doing just now. I’ve seen him do it countless times now, and he almost always comes up with something good, sometimes on cases that were stumping even me. As I watched him do his thing this time, I wondered if that was what I used to look like back when I was first rising up through the ranks. For me, the crime scene itself was never the place where I did my thinking. Ever since I started doing this so many years ago, it was always at my desk in the precinct that I had my epiphanies about cases. The bustling environment of the crime scene never really felt good to me for thinking. My desk was my sanctuary, my little chunk of the world that I could have all to myself, and that was where I did my best work. As I thought about all those times I was just staring at nothing at my desk while thinking, I decided that I probably did look like Mike once. My old partners probably used to watch me think too, marveling at how I just seemed to disappear from the real world.

Mike’s eyebrows loosened up, and I readied myself for the hypothesis. “Okay, I think I have an idea about what kind of person would have done this,” He said, finally looking back at me. “The target of the attack was definitely the man in the living room, simply based on the severity of his wounds compared to the boy. It was a crime of passion, not premeditated. I heard one of the other cops say that seems like they were killed at night. There aren’t any signs that the perpetrator broke into the house, rather it seems that they were invited in, or at least allowed inside.” I listened as he broke it all down for me, all of his theories and his possibilities and all of the reasons that he thinks these things. Increasingly, I felt as though I were watching a younger me through the eyes of my old partners. I remember how I used to feel when I was in Mike’s shoes; I always had a little bit of disdain for my coworkers back in the day. I always had the feeling that I would work faster on my own, that the people around me were slowing me down. I felt like I had to explain every little thought in my head just for them to follow what I was talking about. I bet that’s what Mike was thinking about me now. When comparing myself to him, I can see just how much slower the years have made me, both physically and mentally.

“... In any case, we’ll need to bring in everyone close to the victims and search for some sort of motive,” Mike concluded, snapping me out of my thoughts. “Let’s check the neighbors first, then next of kin. I’ll call to have the family members brought to the precinct., and then we’ll go check in with the neighbors, see what they might know.”

“Yeah, you go on ahead. I’ll meet you there,” I said. In midst of this case, I had been given cause to reevaluate my usefulness as a police officer. But what do I do with that? Retire? I had certainly worked long enough. That decision isn’t one that can be made lightly. There’s preparation and paperwork that goes into it, and I would have to plan some things out. But, the department was in good hands with a young star like Mike moving up. That spirit that I once had that had faded from me was seemingly