A-Sides

  **********

  Heebie didn’t know how it had happened, wouldn’t have understood it if he had been told, and didn’t care. All he knew was that he had spent one night and part of the next day in a holding cell before being released.

  Without the proper resources for a thorough investigation, the state, which assumed that Reese couldn’t organize a one man dash to the shithouse, had taken over the case. Don Lucas, the county DA, had shown up personally at Reese’s office for a confab.

  Considering some of the people who had money by the truckload, Reese had always thought it must be cake to get rich. Sitting across from him, his black and gold Harvard pin gleaming with prudent circumspection on the lapel of his seven hundred dollar jacket, Lucas was an outlier to that view. His teeth were orthodontic straight and his styled hair lay in perfect ranks as precise as a military drill. Even yet, he seemed an adequate enough sort who came from family money that had paid for a Harvard law degree where he had graduated third in his class. Rather than burrowing into the dark underground of politics or becoming a partner in a high priced defense firm, Lucas had come home to prosecute small time hoods and the occasional capital crime, like this one.

  After getting the background on Heebie, Lucas got into the real agenda for his visit.

  “Is Heebie a suspect,” he asked.

  “Time line doesn’t fit,” Reese answered. “Lab guys say the girl’s been dead a week. According to the monitoring company, the only time Heebie’s left his little half acre in the past month was when he came to the police station.” What Heebie didn’t know, and didn’t need to know, was that his county-furnished cell phone had been programmed to have the GPS chip in his phone send a positioning signal every one hundred twenty seconds to a second monitoring company. It was barely feasible that Heebie could have simply left his cell phone at the cemetery, but, cross referenced with the data from his ankle tag, it seemed impossible that Heebie had gone anywhere. He had grazed placidly in his half square mile electronic fence, an unknowing, docile lamb.

  Reese continued. “No way Heebie tramps ten miles to the murder scene and ten miles back without the alarms going off or somebody seeing him. Aside from that, I don’t think Heebie’s got it in him to kill anybody.”

  “Are you forgetting about the Loflin kid?”

  “Oh, come on. You know that’s not the same thing. He was provoked. When it comes right down to it- considering Heebie’s brain power- it wasn’t much more than a schoolyard scuffle. He was never charged.”

  “Exactly my point. You’re holding him without charge and without bail. How long do you think it’s going to be before some hot shot ACLU lawyer looking to make a rep or activist judge drops a ton of shit on you for trampling the civil rights of the ‘mentally challenged’? Pure red meat for all the HuffPo readers and Kos kids who’ll use his detainment as proof of ‘civil rights abuses’ by some backwater, redneck police department. They’ll be poppin’ tents in their pants over it. You’ll get your name on all the leftie blogs as the new Simon Legree, maybe even some rightie blogs as the Oberst-Gruppenfuhrer of the new police state.” Lucas’s eyes shone with dim, world-weary humor and he favored Reese with an ironic grin. “You’ll be famous.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know all that. What about protective custody?”

  “As far as I can tell, that’s pretty much what his cemetery gig is. Unless you can tie him to the body with some hard evidence or shake him from this story about his dead friends pointing him to the victim, you’re gonna have to cut him loose. There was no surveillance of the cemetery? No way to see who he might have talked to?”

  Even at this late date in the surveillance state, Reese could still manage to look stunned. “It’s a cemetery, Don, so no. No pictures.”

  “It’s 2014, Reese,” Lucas reminded him without ill will. “Big Brother is all over. Hell, the last time I had a prostate exam the doctor found the director of Homeland Security. What about his cell logs? Video?”

  “Already dumped. Besides a couple of incoming calls that were wrong numbers, his only call has been to me.” Reese sighed. “I’m on speed dial. And it’s just your basic, plain white wrapper phone so, no. No video.”

  “Any idea, any idea at all, about how he sniffs out a dead body from ten miles away?”

  “People are in and out all day. He heard something, saw something, then got it into his head that his dead friends told him where she was. The only sure thing is that the killer, or someone who knew about it, was in that boneyard sometime in the past week and blabbed, but we can’t shake Heebie from his story. Hell, he talks to anybody that will listen to him. We’re tracking down any and everybody that might have talked to him or saw who he was talking to, but people don’t normally advertise visits to their dead loved ones, so it’s gonna be slow.”

  “You don’t get a lot of homicides around here. How much interference will there be?”

  Reese thought about it.

  “Today’s Friday. Locals have probably heard five different versions of the story already, but the county paper was published yesterday. It won’t come out again for a week. Some of the city dailies around here will print the story, but you’ve probably got at least three or four days before the questions get really hot.”

  Lucas summed up his final decision in a considered sigh. “Okay,” he said. “Since you’ve already got tabs on Heebie, turn him out.”