May 21 2009
Dialogue sketches for ‘Burn Pattern’
“Where would we even start? Things got no head.”
“Take a ride through.”
“Ride through. On what?”
“East. Elmshire. Provost. Take your pick.”
“There is no East side.”
“Fucking dead ends. Nothing on this guy. Address undetermined. No numbers, I.D. Nothing. Who the fuck is this kid? Shows up in a tank, after a fire? One of two survivors, and he’s a nobody. Doesn’t exist. Or, at least he did until he walked out the goddamn front door. He’s a sketchy frame from a ten year old camera pointed in the wrong direction.”
“Man, that was eight years ago. I went through those files…and believe me there was a shit ton of paperwork—I went through the bulk of those files and still don’t remember everything. I’m not going to remember everything.”
“About your old crew.”
“What about them?”
“It never comes up?”
“Never comes up.”
“You don’t think about the case?”
“Not one day. Not until this prick started setting fires. I mean…. ”
“What about the guys, though? Anyone you think might’ve botched the evidence?”
“The hell you talking about?”
“Who ran the detail?”
“Mercer. Chang. If anyone could botch even a pot of coffee it was that douche bag. But we didn’t let him anywhere near the evidence. Chang was just a punter, some asshole to push papers. Gra—”
“Jim Grady.”
“…Grady was a real cop. Bled blue. Blakley ran—he was the patron saint of good detective work—ran the case like you’ve never seen. Sully. Ronald “Butternuts” was a slop. Guy drank more than I did there close to the end. Fucking screwed his wife and kids with his pension, getting axed like that.”
“I heard about that. Two, three years ago.”
“We ran that detail hard, like pros. And Blakley shut it down, man. I tell you what, I couldn’t’ve held it together the way the he did. Reid’s good and all, but his prick doesn’t measure to Blakley’s. They were all good cops.”
“And you got the guy?”
“You think we didn’t? … You think we didn’t. That we just posted some fuck on a life sentence. Think where your loyalties are before you start throwing shit.”
“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m not questioning loyalties. I’m saying…”
“That what? The guy was known. We made him. Caught the motherfucker in the red, doused in gasoline. Was going to set himself on fire. He got what he deserved burning those kids. You saw the pictures?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Then you know what this shit is about. If that shit doesn’t get you, nothing will. You find a guy like that and you put him down, either on the spot or you send him out on life. You don’t take a chance on a guy like that walking away after ten years, twenty years. I don’t give a shit. We buried that cocksucker so deep he was going to die in a cage, or, God willing, with a needle in his arm. So no, I haven’t thought about him a day since.”
Captain: “Durham, Neilson: I want you to cross-reference area communications in the past twenty-four hours. Go back ten years against our records. Red flag anything close. Any hits, you let me know. Listen to me, I’ll get the authorization on a tag if and when it comes up. The rules are flexible, so we’ll deal with the proper channels when we get there. Until then, everything goes through me. Got it?”
“Got it, Cap.”
“Let’s get in there.”