Image by Philipp T from Pixabay
“This whole situation is a mess, and it has just gotten messier, and I hate these masks … but I'm glad we're here.”
In his manifestation as police captain of both the Blue Ridge Precinct and Special Investigations, H.F. Lee smiled to hear Officer Baxter say that. All 13 men, even those not paid to work that day, had come in and were spread out between the four trailers and five big tents on the parking lot they were using because of the pandemic.
It had been a hard run since October 2019 and never let up – the pandemic was actually the easiest thing to occur in terms of the work. A third of the precinct area had literally burned down in September just after a police brutality incident that had gotten the whole department into all evil – the combination of events had led to Capt. Lee moving over from Special Investigations to whip the precinct into shape.
“You figure a Lee as Lee as him would know how,” some of the men had grumbled, but not too loud … on the first day, the new captain calling folks to order while they were in donut nap mode had literally killed an officer. The new captain had ordered him carried out without batting an eye, and the implication was that anyone else caught lacking just might be next.
But, with time, the new captain's mix of strict, fair, and personally involved leadership began to win over the survivors who had not been involved with the fiery failure and the brutality … it also didn't hurt that he had realized something was up with the precinct building and gotten them all out before it fell right off its foundations … the upgrade job that was supposed to have happened, hadn't because someone had walked off with $19.8 million of a $20 million job … but the new temporary accommodationst had been top-of-the-line because “Lee is a hard, hard man, but he is hard for us, not just on us.”
By the end of July 2020, the men of the Blue Ridge precinct felt just like the young lieutenants of Special Investigations: they loved their commander, and verged on worshiping him. That was the reason they had all come in: in the latest financial crisis that threatened their livelihood, they wanted to be in his regal calm and focus on doing good work. That was the gift he had given the precinct, now among the best in the department: a way past the humiliation and noise back into respect.
The main good for the day in addition to the usual patrols for the precinct was getting the Berner case closed and to the district attorney's office before close of business Friday, and it came down to one strange issue...
“So, there are only two real ways to have cattle falling from the sky, and neither of them have to do with cows jumping over the moon,” Lieutenant Andrew Anderson said.
On the day Evan Berner had been found dead, the lieutenant was still at the age of knowing the nursery rhyme about said cows and dishes running away with the spoon – but what had not been connected to Mr. Berner's death were two other strange events: a barn burning and cows dead under mysterious circumstances in odd places. Special Investigations had noticed that all the cows and Mr. Berner were in roughly the same circle, within a radius of half a mile from the barn.
“Now, as it happened, there were thunderstorms, and the barn fire was put out by the rain, and a lot of evidence was washed away, but I've pulled up all the storm spotters and chasers' logs throughout Lofton County, and we should be able to rule out a tornado shortly.”
“I reviewed the report on the barn – definitely not just fire damage, and the pictures do suggest an explosion,” Capt. Lee said. “However, no trace of high explosives, nor sufficient heat damage to suggest them was found.”
Lt. Anderson smiled grimly.
“As a country boy from down here in the valley, Captain, I can tell you something that might not be as obvious to a military officer who hails from Appalachia: fertilizer bombs are still a thing, although that's a real messy job done with farm waste.”
“Well,” Capt. Lee said, “that really does cut down on the number of suspects.”
“It does,” Lt. Anderson said. “We're getting closer, Captain.”
“Yes, indeed, Lieutenant, we are.”
When looking at the cow, a European with Balkan roots naturally thinks of the world-famous Atom Heart Mother rather than an animal in space or a metaphor in English.
So, not much less exciting than your short story – which I want to address in a few sentences.
The situation described in the focus is a wonderful example of how a change at the top of an organisation that is stuck in its structures can have a positive impact in the long term, even if some of the details are unfamiliar to me because they are hardly imaginable in Europe. Despite initial prejudices.
As someone who lives in the middle of the countryside, I can only agree with what Lieutenant Anderson says. On farms, there's always so much explosive material in storage that the farmer doesn't even know what's in his shed. Most of the time, he only finds out when the place is already in flames.
Later on, with Pink Floyd playing in the background, I'll go over your story again in my head.
My father and grandparents grew up in the country, and that's where Lieutenant Anderson gets his knowledge, but we used to vacation in the mountains, and that's part of where Capt. Lee gets his knowledge!
The situation the Big Loft Police Department is in has taken literal years of freewriting for them to get into, but is the compendium of a bunch of incidents that have happened with ransomware attacks and police corruption investigations that have actually happened in my lifetime.
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