[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.It’d be a lot like watching a presidential debate.Someone out there knew something, though.No one can disappear completely, least of all someone with a hostage and an injury.Ash stood and paced the room, his stomach twisting the way it did when he and his family huddled in the basement after hearing tornado sirens.All five detectives on the task force knew their jobs, four homicide detectives stood on call if needed, and the rest of the department stood ready to back him up in case of an emergency.He shouldn’t have felt nervous, but he did.“Kristen Tanaka didn’t attend the press conference tonight,” he said.“She was probably out boffing somebody for tipping her off to the case,” said Smith, leaning back in his chair and sticking his legs on the table.“I don’t know how you get invited to the party, but I hear she does that sort of thing.”Ash shook his head but didn’t say anything.Kristen might fail a journalistic ethics class, but he didn’t think she’d skip a press conference with the lead detective on a major case to thank a source.She might, though, if she had a meeting with someone more pressing.“Does anybody know how to use this thing?” he asked, grabbing one of the room’s three remote controls from the table.“I’ve got it,” said Alvarez.Ash threw him the remote, and the detective hit half a dozen buttons, causing the lights to dim, a screen to roll down, and the projector to spontaneously turn on.“What channel you want?”“Whatever channel Kristen Tanaka is on.”Alvarez flipped through the lineup until coming to the local channels.Rebecca’s abduction led the newscast at Tanaka’s station, but the lead anchor covered the story, not her.He even showed an edited clip of Captain Bowers speaking at the press conference; the station must have purchased the video from one of the other broadcasters.They stuck to the department’s narrative: a still unknown suspect abducted Rebecca, and they needed help finding him.Almost as soon as the station flashed the number for the Crime Stoppers tip line, the phone banks lit up and the detectives went to work.Even with that story aired, the unease didn’t leave Ash’s stomach.Tanaka should have handled it.She had something else going on.He found out what when the anchor introduced the second story of the night and the video shifted to a live report from the parking lot of the state fairgrounds, roughly a block from the corner where Rebecca had been abducted.The camera panned to Kristen and a heavyset woman in sweatpants and a purple tank top.The woman shifted her weight from foot to foot, shaking her head slightly.The camera probably made her nervous, but her weight shifting made it look as if she had to go to the bathroom.That probably wasn’t her intent.“Unfortunately, as tragic as Rebecca Cook’s case is, she wasn’t the only victim tonight,” said Kristen.“At approximately six this evening, three police officers carrying shotguns came to Lynette Rogers’s near-north-side home and dragged her unarmed son to the front lawn where they Tasered him repeatedly after he reported not knowing anything about Ms.Cook’s disappearance.”Ash swore aloud, causing Alvarez to stop speaking midsentence and look up, his eyebrows raised quizzically.Ash pointed to the screen and swore again.“He resisted arrest,” said Smith, resting a phone against his chest so the caller he had been speaking to couldn’t hear him.“What should we have done? The asshole had an outstanding warrant against him for assaulting his parole officer with a lead pipe.He came at us, and we Tasered him because we didn’t know if he was armed.It was him or us.”If true, Detective Smith had acted correctly to protect the other officers in his detail, but that probably wouldn’t help matters much.The situation had been ugly all night, but now Detective Smith had just set foot in front of a giant fan in the midst of a shit-throwing contest.“Make sure to detail it in your report,” he said, leaning against the table and glancing at the screen again.Tanaka’s witness claimed that the police tried to kill her son and make it look like an accident [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]