Chapter 31: Interviews

Tuesday, April 4, 2028

My cell phone rang, and I answered, “Reaper Security Consulting.”

“Can I speak to Doctor Reaper?” It was a man calling, and the number was a local Matucket number.

“Speaking. How can I help you?”

“Mister Reaper, I mean Doctor Reaper, I’m Jim Talbot. I’m the new County Executive for Matucket County. I got a call from Bo Effner and he said that I should talk to you about the Matucket Police Department. He said you would know what needs to be done there.”

I gave a wry smile at that, though Talbot couldn’t see it. Bo had called me the other day and told me that he had given my name to the new County Executive, with a strong suggestion that he listen carefully to what I had to say. Considering that Bo was the Lieutenant Governor of Georgia, a wise County Executive would at least give me a call.

“Yes, Mister Talbot. The Lieutenant Governor talked to me about the problems we have with the department. He told me he was going to call you,” I replied.

“Well, Doctor, I’m hoping to sit down with you sometime soon. What is your schedule like?”

“I’m fairly flexible this week, but next week might be tight. Can we talk this week?”

I heard a rustle of some papers and he said, “Thursday morning alright? Depending on how our conversation goes, maybe we can stretch it into lunch.”

We settled on 1030 and hung up. Then I went back to working on a report for a police department in Alabama that wanted a third-party review of the suggested creation of a SWAT team. My review wasn’t positive. The politicians who had come up with the cockamamie idea didn’t understand just how expensive a SWAT team was.

Thursday morning, I put on a good suit and drove over to the county office building. Like most government buildings, the entrance was both guarded and monitored by magnetometers. Since I always carried a pistol, I knew I would be stopped and questioned, and I pulled out my credentials in preparation. The line was short, so I simply got in the queue. When I got to the front, I showed my identification and opened my suit coat to show my Glock in my shoulder holster. Both county deputies knew me and waved me inside. I thanked them and found the County Executive’s office.

I ended up on a couch for a few minutes until his secretary informed me I could go in. As offices go, it was an average government office, though a bit larger than most. Very generic wood tones and beige with a short-pile carpet. Jim Talbot was standing at the door and shook my hand and ushered me over to a couple of armchairs. “Thank you for coming in, Doctor Reaper.”

“Thank you. Happy to come in. Call me Grim.”

“And I’m Jim. Please, have a seat. Can I get you some coffee?” We sat and I considered what I knew about Talbot, which wasn’t much. He had only been hired about three months ago, after three months of a hiring process. That had been after the previous County Executive had gone to jail in a kickback scandal involving the Matucket Police Department. Now we needed a new Chief of Police as well. Talbot had been brought in from Shreveport, where he had been an Assistant Mayor. Now he had to clean up the mess.

“Yes, please.” Talbot stuck his head out the door and asked for a couple of cups. Then he returned and sat down across from me. “How do you like Matucket so far?” I asked.

“I like it. It’s not as humid, for one thing, and at least I don’t have to worry about being washed away by the Red River.”

I laughed at that. The Army Corps of Engineers was in the middle of another flood mess in Louisiana, with failed levees and flooded cities. “No, Matucket really doesn’t have flood problems like that, though some of the creeks do get messy at times. Matucket Creek is pretty tame. How about the new job?”

He rolled his eyes. “It’s a big job, but I think I’m getting a handle on it. It’s different, though. For one thing, Louisiana has a different legal code. Theirs is based on the French Napoleonic code. The rest of the country is based on English common law. It’s a bit different at times.” Talbot had a muted Cajun accent. “Back when I arrived, one of the Councilmen told me that Georgia was a state with some degree of corruption and Louisiana was corruption with some degree of state. I wasn’t quite sure whether he was approving or disapproving.”

“With some of them, I’m sure there was a tinge of jealousy involved,” I told him.

“Doctor Reaper, I asked you here to talk to you about the job of becoming the police chief, but before we get into that, can you tell me why the lieutenant governor is involved in this?”

I laughed at that. “I am guessing you don’t know much about Bo Effner.”

“I’d never even heard of him until I got the phone call. I’ve met the governor and some other people in Atlanta, but that’s it so far.”

“Okay. Quick history lesson. Bo Effner is from Matucket. While he and his family might live in Atlanta, they still have a house here. He’s my best friend. We went to school here, from elementary school right through high school. After that, we split apart. I went into the Army, and he went off to Princeton and Harvard Law. Then we both came back. I went onto the force, and he hired on with the District Attorney’s office and began working his way up. He became the District Attorney about a dozen years ago, became the US Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, taught law over at UGA, and then ran for lieutenant governor.”

“He ran for lieutenant governor?” asked Talbot, a curious look on his face.

I smiled. “Georgia’s a bit different that way. Unlike most states, where the governor and lieutenant governor are elected as a package, in Georgia both the governor and lieutenant governor are elected separately.”

He gave me an odd look. “So, it would be possible that you could have a governor from one party and a lieutenant governor from a different party?”

I nodded. “It happened back in the 2000s. We had a Democratic lieutenant governor and a Republican governor for a few years.”

“How bizarre!” I just nodded at that. “So, you two are still close.”

“He’s the godfather of my oldest child. His wife was one of my wife’s bridesmaids.”

“Answer me honestly. Did you put him up to this?”

“It’s a fair question. Certainly, it would make sense. But no, this was his idea, not mine. Not that I couldn’t do it, but no, it was his idea. He called me about it before he called you, but only to ask if I would be interested.”

“And you’re interested,” he said.

“I’m interested. God only knows why since it will involve a pay cut. Are you interested in me?” I asked.

“I don’t know yet. When I was being recruited, I was told that the police department had problems and that a big job was to hire a new chief of police and fix the department. Since then, I’ve been buried in other problems, but the council keeps asking me when I am fixing this and then giving me their suggestions, which are generally bad. Mister Effner says you’re the expert, so you tell me, what the hell is going on with the Matucket Police Department!”

I laughed at that. “How much of the history of Matucket do you know? What did the council tell you?”

“I got the basic grade school version, I think. Something about a guy named Matucket who led a pioneering party to West Georgia and settled here. Then we had a Civil War. Then I got hired,” he replied.

I nodded. “And I am guessing you have figured out since then that it was actually a little more complicated?” He smiled and nodded, and I smiled back. “Yeah, they don’t give the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in that explanation. Here’s a bit more info. Yes, Matucket was founded by mighty Captain Matucket who led a pioneering party from civilization into the wilderness to tame the wild country. A deeper look shows that the whole bunch of them were a bunch of low-level crooks and schnooks running out on debts and wives. The one thing they didn’t want to bring was civilization.”

“Sounds like Louisiana, even today.”

“So, I’ve heard. Anyway, the county lines were basically drawn at the end of the Civil War and were basically Matucket and East Matucket and the surrounding areas. For most of the time since then the two cities were separate but back in the 1970s the city of Matucket dissolved itself and merged with the county. East Matucket followed suit a few years later. That’s why we have a County Executive running things and not a mayor.” Again, he nodded. “It has not been a perfect marriage. You have an old style poor urban area in Matucket, rural farm area in the west and north of the county, and an East Matucket full of upscale suburbs and Atlanta exurbs. The sheriff runs the county jail and guards the courthouse and the county office building and runs the patrol on the lake in the summer. The police run everything else.”

“That’s how the department was explained to me. What went wrong?” he asked.

I sighed. “Short answer? The county council decided they knew how to run the police department better than professional police officers. If you go back far enough, Matucket was just another southern police department. If you were white, it was good. If you weren’t, it wasn’t. It got to the point where about twenty-some years ago a white cop shot an unarmed black kid, and we had a riot. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, but for the first time people seemed to take exception to it. There was an investigation, and all sorts of crap was uncovered. The County Executive and the Chief got fired and they brought in some people to clean up. Sound familiar?” I asked.

“Disturbingly so.”

“So, what they did was bring in a new chief, got rid of some people, and promoted a few people who hadn’t been involved. That was about the time I got out of the Army, and I was hired after that.”

“After you earned the Medal of Honor,” he said. “I’ve seen your Wikipedia page.”

I shrugged at that. Everybody who has ever been awarded the MOH gets a Wikipedia page. The only difference with mine was that Kelly had edited it to include all my other military and police medals. “Yes and no. I never knew about the medal until three years later, and I never told anybody about my service, other than I had seen some combat. I had some PTSD issues at the time. As far as the department was concerned, I was just one more vet who needed a job. Anyway, for the next ten years the department became a really good department, probably the best in West Georgia. We got rid of the jerks, hired a bunch of young kids, and trained them properly, and ignored whatever the council wanted us to do. We had two chiefs in that time, Joe Jefferson, the guy they brought in to clean things up, and Mike Crowley, who was a local boy like me, who knew Matucket.”