Detective Young is sitting at his desk at the Knoxville, Tennessee Police Department. He has been nursing a cup of coffee since the morning, it is noon now, and he is still sips at it every now and then even though it is cold. He’d been reviewing files of murders with horribly mutilated corpses from the last five years, combing through them for similarities that might jump out at him.
He would have his presentation with the Chief of Police and Captain of the Department and he was sure that he could be assigned a task force now with the recent chaos in the meth community. There had been over a dozen bodies that seemed to be related to a mysterious, glow in the dark meth and the department was eager to get to the bottom of it. Young hoped to involve both the Violent and Organized Crime Units because it seemed that the case involved both murder and drugs.
Lost in his work, Young doesn’t notice the young white man enter the department. He wears a tank top and jeans, and his hair is cut low to his head. He asks for Young at the front and then thanks the officer who points out his desk. He leans over the desk and clears his throat.
“Excuse me, Detective, my name is Pete. I’m Clete’s brother.”
Young startles and then he stares at the Young man. “Oh, you scared me. Sorry I was lost in it. Sit down. You Clete’s brother? You friends with the young man that owns that loud truck?”
Pete seems nervous and he sits. He looks like he is in his twenties, but the obvious fear of talking with a police officer made him look younger. “No sir, I mean, yessir. I mean, I know him.”
“He told me that when the people cooking meth in that house dropped off money, he had them drive to your house. I spoke with your brother. Your family house ain’t the bank for meth dealers, is it?”
Young folds his arms on top of the desk and straightens his back to be taller than Pete and he looks down at him.
“Sir, naw, not at all.”
“Well then, that mean you holding money for some meth dealers. Is that what I should assume?”
Pete hung his head.
“You should talk to me son. I don’t really care about the drugs, I mean I got to report it and all, and they gone do what they do about that, but it’s some dead bodies. And I’m guess you knew some of the people dead in that house and you probably want to know what happened to them? Talk to me, tell me what you can so I can figure it out.”
It had fallen right into his lap, and after a long conversation in an interrogation room, Pete is led off in cuffs. Young smiles at him as he walks away. He’d told the same story that the driver had told him. He just did his job for other people and there was blue meth. But everybody that he ever talked to seemed to have died in that house. He had given information about the location of their money, which the police would later recover from a long abandoned barn in the middle of nowhere.
Young appreciates the cooperation and the new information could open up new lines of the investigation, but Young can’t help but question it all. He’d been suspicious of Pete’s brother when he questioned him; Clete seemed very much like a professional criminal who was seasoned in evading law enforcement, but his brother just shows up and gives himself to police? It seems like Pete had sacrificed himself to keep Young off of someone who could tell him a whole lot more than Pete could.
“One step at a time,” Young thinks to himself as he watches Pete being taken to the local jail.
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