After Harmony Wright left the force, Gene Reid was assigned as Shirley Stanley’s new partner.
Gene had only recently completed his training, and there were plenty of doubts about him. He seemed to lack confidence, and freely shared his concerns about joining the department in the shadow of the Kate Meadows case. Patrol in a small town like Berlin usually meant planting inside a cruiser and waiting for something to happen, usually minor traffic violations, the common stock of speeding, which society had given up on as a vice, had turned it into a virtue, which meant issuing actual tickets for couldn’t just be done because of what a radar said.
This gave those inside the cruiser plenty of time to think, waiting on nothing. If anything Gene was an overthinker, which was what Shirley had spent a lot of her time complaining about. She’d already had her fill of the Meadows case. Like most people she’d viewed Harmony’s departure as a closing of the book. The town positively crawled with folks trying to prove otherwise, always buzzing the station, just a regular swarm of nuisance, but then, for a town used to being ignored all the attention was an embarrassment on multiple levels, and that was certainly going to cause a backlash.
Gene persisted. As the weeks advanced into months, he settled in. Shirley developed a kind of affection for him, began to grasp his thought process. It didn’t change how she felt about the Meadows case, but she was at least willing to humor him. There was plenty of time to kill, after all.
She listened as he talked about Matt White, at how he’d been overlooked, taken at face value, at how he had blatantly lied to everyone, at how no one had looked deeper into his claims. Shirley felt insulted, but then Gene was hardly the only one who had been talking about Matt White. The dog sitter, the detective missing a leg, Perry Shepherd.
In fiction it’s common to solve crimes to a thoroughly satisfactory degree. In the real world there’s always doubt. The infuriating part is that even when there seems to be absolutely no doubt it’s still difficult to prove. That’s what Shirley kept trying to argue with Gene. But Gene persisted.
Gene went over everything all over again. He talked to Bradley, to Hodgson, to Shepherd, to Rios, to Kay Poole. He even went up to visit Priscilla Foster. Ford, who had hired all the private investigators, one after the other, privately admitted he was ashamed at how all this had played out. He consulted Tara Thompson, the detective, who had also included White in her list of suspects, but who had been dissuaded from pursuing the case, in the end, had discovered why the FBI wasn’t involved, why Ford felt so beleaguered, and it was a matter of innocence.
The wrong kind of innocence. White was distantly connected to the right kind of people. In different times, different ages, different contexts, the right kind of people look very different, but in the final analysis they tend to be untouchable. White himself wasn’t in their number, but the fact of his association had placed him under their graces. Not everything that had happened, here, was a result of their meddling, but enough. Just enough. Tyler Salazar, that elusive infiltrator, had been from their number, a bastard outcast, a failed spoiled wreck of a fortunate son, all those years ago, of the number who in the days of the Nazis would have done everything to downplay what Nazis actually were, but in later days have pretended there was no way to know how awful Nazis were.
If only.
Gene pushed his way through. He found the blood evidence that had been hiding in plain sight, in Matt White’s car, down in Casco Bay, the car White had reported as stolen before Meadows had gone missing, had proven beyond a shadow of a doubt how premeditated the whole bloody affair had been, how White had slipped, had admitted it to the conspiracy theorist Dale Salvage, finally, how Salvage hadn’t thought much at the time, had admitted it to Gene, how Wilmut Snee, when asked again, had admitted to seeing White’s Mitsubishi in twilight hours after the disappearance, corroborated by Emily Bowman, corroborated by Cyril Fernandez, now cooperating on a plea bargain…
All this didn’t elevate Gene’s standing in the department. He didn’t grow in confidence so much as become exasperated, and as a rule it’s really not a good thing to question the system. No one learned anything, learning the truth of what had happened to Kate Meadows, and why it had been so difficult to discover.
Gene settled into a frustrating life. He’d had practice. In this instance, practice didn’t make perfect.
