Page 83 of Fish in a Barrel
Billy leaned over his back and gave him the small brown dog. “Look, Jackson’s calming down the kitties, so you go calm down the puppy and let the rest of us kids look at the screens, okay?”
Sean leveled him a look of pure bathos. “You are not endearing yourself to me, you realize that.”
Billy’s smile had a hint of smugness to it. “Of course I am. Now go sit.”
For the first time, it occurred to Ellery that Sean and his “pretty nurse,” as they’d all thought of Billy, might have a relationship a little deeper than first supposed. Well, given Sean’s rather strict Catholic family, that could be awkward.
“Stop looking at them like that,” Henry murmured as Billy helped Sean up by the elbow and walked him into the living room.
“Like what?”
“Like they’re doomed.”
Ellery smiled faintly. “I was surprised,” he said. “I don’t think they’re doomed. I think Jackson is… I don’t know. Magic.”
“That’s sweet,” Henry said dryly. “Do you want to go check on your magic human to see if he’s asleep?”
“Ten more minutes,” Ellery told him, taking another forkful of noodles and sliding behind Jackson’s laptop. “In the meantime, tell me what I’m looking for.”
“This is the video footage from the intersections surrounding the shooting site. We didn’t find any brass—which probably means whoever is military trained—but they had to get there from somewhere. Each computer has a different intersection, and basically we’re forwarding between cars and then checking out the faces of the people driving through.”
Ellery sighed. “If this was the movies, there’d be a pile of cigarette butts or shells and we could do DNA testing.”
“Hey, if Jackson and I hadn’t found toolmarks where the sniper put a tripod, we wouldn’t have shit.”
“Oh, we’d have shit,” Sean said from the couch. “We’d have the shittiest union rep who ever wore a badge in a casket like a turd, that’s what we’d have.”
Ellery frowned. Of all the things they hadn’t checked out yet, Charlie Boehner’s enemies hadn’t even come up. GoddamnTrey Cartman and his impulse to cover the truth up instead of discovering it; he’d cost an entire day’s worth of investigation as Jackson and Henry had investigated the cover-up instead of the murder.
“He was hated?” Ellery asked, hitting Play on his video footage. “Why?”
“Well, for one thing, he had his head so far up Cartman’s ass, he could taste what Cartman had for breakfast.”
Ellery grimaced but kept his eyes on the screen. “Charming. What impact did that have on you guys?”
Sean grunted. “You know that LGBTQ chapter of the union we used to have?”
“Yeah?” Then Ellery’s eyes widened as the implication of “used to” sank in. “Oh.”
“But it’s more than that. The guy could fight for us like a pit bull, but it was always the wrong stuff. He fought to get cops out of trouble for excessive force, fought to get them overtime for bullshit duties, fought to give them second chances when they failed sensitivity training. You know what hedidn’tfight for?”
“Family leave, mental health care, de-escalation training, confidential substance abuse counseling?” Ellery hazarded, because he was starting to see a pattern.
“See? Youdidknow the guy,” K-Ski finished sourly. “Every bad stereotype about the police—that’swhat he fought for. The stuff that would help make us better? Didn’t even rate.” He grunted. “And to make matters worse, I seriously think he cheated on the last election.”
There was a chorus of groans from a group of people who had heard thatwaytoo often in the past year, and Sean laughed.
“Yeah, I know how it sounds. I’m just saying. Christie’s cousin Jaime was running for the position, and she was running progressive, and she had mad support. I’m not sure what Boehner said or did to make Chambers declare him the winner, but he was the kind of guy who cheated, and I’m not taking that back.”
Ellery was about to snort derisively and write it off as sour grapes, but something kept running through his head. Something about the Halloween party and Brentwood’s desperately unhappy expression immediately after he’d flip-flopped so noticeably on his support for the trial. “I’m not sure what Boehner said or did…,”Sean had said—and that usually meant coercion.
Brentwood’s behavior indicated a pattern common to blackmail. Except Brentwood hadn’t been able to go through with it, had he? He’d pushed to make a deal in the end, to exonerate Ezekiel because he couldn’t watch a perversion of justice.
And Cartman’s desire to hide the true killer—would that mean Cartman had been blackmailed too? Would finding the killer lead them to the dirt on Cartman that he seemed so desperate to keep hidden?
Things were starting to fall into place. Now if only they could get a bead on who the sniper—
“Shit,” Ellery said, hitting pause on the film in front of him. “Guys? Are we sure our perpetrator was in a vehicle?”
