I was in deep slumber when the phone decided to start playing Keane’s “Everybody’s Changing” song, at full blast. I was dreaming about making donuts with a young Olivia Newton-John, circa “Grease,” when the phone began to signal my return to real life. At least I think I was; I read somewhere that you tend to lose recall of your dreams about an hour after you wake up, unless they somehow make the transition to long term memory. I grunted; this dream wasn’t going to make that transition. Who makes donuts with Olivia Newton-John? Couldn’t my brain have at least given me a sex dream about her? She was my first crush, after all.

I opened my eyes and glanced at the clock. The blue LED numbers read 12:14. Great. Asleep for an hour and half. Yeah, I’m old. I get to sleep before eleven. So what? Sue me. I did all my “staying up late” shit when I was twenty. I’m fifty now, and I like sleep.

Clarice stirred next to me, also brought out of her sleep by the phone, pushing at me gently to answer it.

I reached out and grabbed the phone. If it was Keane’s main song playing, then I knew who it was. Miranda, my partner of four years, was calling, and it wasn’t a social call. She knew better.

“Yeah?” I grumbled as I answered the phone. No preamble, no niceties. If I was being called at this time of night, the call didn’t need it. It was nothing good.

“Sorry to call so late, John. We caught one tonight. Need to get your ass down here. It’s a puzzler.”

I grunted again.

“Fine. Where? Text me the address. I’m naked and without a pen. There, imagine that, Miri.” I loved to give her a hard time. The only thing imagining me naked would do would make her retch. Miranda was into women, and very attractive women at that. I was at the other end of the spectrum of attractive, gay or straight.

“Oh, you know how to make a girl quiver, John,” she replied, and then just broke the connection.

I got up, trying to be careful not to disturb Clarice any more than she already had been.

“Gotta go in?” she mumbled without turning over, more awake than I had thought.

“Yeah. Sorry, babe. Duty calls. Miranda says we caught a case. I had though Murphy and his idiot sidekick were on call tonight, but apparently not. I’ll be back when I’m back. Don’t wait on me. Love ya, babe.”

She just said, “Murmmm,” and snuggled down a bit deeper into the covers. She was right. It was cold outside; January in Minneapolis will do that to you.

I walked over to the bathroom, grabbing clothes as I went, closed the door behind me and turned on the light, dressing as fast as I could.

I still took the time to brush my teeth, and then stared at myself critically in the mirror, the overhead LED lightbulbs casting a glare on my face. Clarice had bought the ‘outside light’ type, and their magnesium glare was far harsher on my face than I thought it should have been.

There, staring back at me, was one John McDouglas Tulley, fifty years old, on the Minneapolis Metro PD for the past fifteen years, eight years as a beat cop and seven as a homicide detective. I work in the fourth precinct, out of downtown city hall. I had a shaved head, – hey, when it starts to thin, just take it all off I say, and was perpetually blue chinned, even though I shaved as close as I could every morning. I was in fairly decent shape; I wasn’t going to win any marathons, but I wasn’t hugely overweight either. Six foot, two hundred ten even; not so bad at my age. Slightly sunken eyes, blue, of course, with what looked like bags starting to form under them. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised, with the year we’d had.

There was a gang war afoot out there, – gangs from the east, – Milwaukee, Madison, even Chicago, were making their presence felt, and the local gangs weren’t happy about it. There’d been back and forth between them, beatings, shootings, even a family decapitated, like you see the Mexican cartels do. It had quietened down over the summer, then flared up again in the fall. There was what looked like a fragile truce over the holidays, but here we were in January, and boom, looked like it was starting again.

We’d solved most of the homicides we’d been given, but never with enough evidence to prosecute anyone. The gangs were good; multiple years of experience at this sort of thing made them very good at both cleaning up, making sure there was no evidence, and if there were witnesses, suddenly they didn’t want to talk anymore. We knew what was going on, and most of the time who, but never acquired enough to put anyone away. It was frustrating and annoying, and it kept us all working way more than we should have needed to.

Here was another one, it seemed. I sighed. Just time to gargle with the mouthwash, and off I went.

I was right. It was cold out. I wished I was back in the sack with Clarice. She was always game for “sharing warmth” as she put it. Hell, I’d even share warm bodily fluids too; it would seem only neighborly, you know? I’m just that good of a guy.

I drove to the location given by Miranda, letting Google Maps guide me. Hell, we had this technology, why not use it, right? That was a thing now, letting map devices and applications guide you. What ever happened to navigating by remembered landmarks? When I was a kid, we used to know where things were based on their relative position to bars and pizza joints. Now, it’s all apps and smart phones and all that crap. Instead of being in our heads, it’s all in the “cloud”. God knows, the phones were smarter than most of the people who use them, that’s for sure.

Still, I used them too. Around this neighborhood, I didn’t know my way that well, so it was Modern Technology All The Way.

It only took thirty-five minutes, but then it was midnight on a weekday.

When I got there, there was the usual amount of controlled mayhem. Cruisers, an ambulance, a morgue truck, beat cops moving with purpose. I flashed my badge at Trent, who was the first cop I saw once I got out of the car. I didn’t really need to; he knew who I was. We were old drinking buddies - but it’s ingrained in me, so I did it anyway.

“Bad one, John,” he said, the breath puffing out in the cold. “Go on inside. Ground floor. Miranda is in there.”

We were standing outside an office building off East 26^th street. It was a small one, with a window that advertised “Newton Accounting.” There was a cop at the door, and I flashed him my badge as I went inside. It was a two-person office, a receptionist area where the window to the street was, and another room behind it, presumably where the accountant, – Mr. Newton? – worked. I glanced around the receptionist room. Computer, but completely clear desk. Phone, but turned sideways. No personal photographs, chair pulled into the desk completely. Yeah, no one worked here. This must have been a one-man operation. I walked into the back room, and there was Miranda, talking to the police photographer, Jason Blakoviach. She saw me, flashed me a look, nodded at the desk and what was on the floor behind it, before carrying on her conversation.

The big desk was a U shaped, with the occupant’s computer in the middle, complete with two screens. There was a printer on one side, and a stack of documents on the other. The office held the other usual stuff: chairs on the other side of the desk, wall full of official documentation, filing cabinets, all the stuff you’d expect to find.

What you wouldn’t expect to find was the dead body on the floor, right beside the chair. The front top of the skull was absent, or more accurately, as I looked, I saw bits of it on the floor under the desk. There was blood everywhere; head shots always do generate a lot of blood, since so much of the body’s blood is pumped up there, under pressure.

I glanced at Miranda, and caught her eye, with an inquiring glance. She nodded. We both knew what I was asking, – “Has forensics done their stuff yet??” Obviously they had, but I still didn’t want to risk contaminating the scene. Now that I looked, I could see the tell-tale finger print dust on the desk edges, where you are more likely to grip them, and there didn’t seem to be any smudges. That meant they were wiped down, since you’d expect at least some to be there. The fact that there weren’t any at all meant someone had wiped them down. I knew that this had been professional stuff. Knowing what I knew, I didn’t expect there to be any revealing clues at this scene, – I wouldn’t have left any, if it were me. Professionals clean up. It makes it hard for cops. I guess that’s the whole point of it.

And so it was murder. And it definitely was murder. You don’t commit suicide by blowing the front of your head off from the back. I crouched down and took a longer and closer look, using my phone flashlight for more illumination.

Yeah, no gun in evidence, so definitely murder. Dead people don’t throw their guns away after having done the deed. They are good about that. He was lying forward, towards the desk, face to one side, legs out towards the door. I mimed what I thought had happened, he was on his knees, facing the inside of the desk, the shooter was behind, pointing the gun down ... yeah, that would tally up with the entrance wound at the back of the head, and the exit on the front. From the cranial destruction, any good detective would know we were looking at a .38 caliber, at least. Perhaps even .45. The bullet was probably still here somewhere, given the angle of fire.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too,” said Miranda, behind me. She was done with her conversation and was now watching me re-enact my interpretation of events.

“Looks like an execution. One shot to the back of the head. Remind you of anyone?”

She was talking about our local mob boss; one Macey Phillips. He ran the local mob, with fingers into almost everything illegal in which it was possible to have fingers. Or other appendages. I think the only thing he didn’t run was the bingo at the local old people’s home. Even then, I wouldn’t put it past him. He was under siege from the families further east, and he liked to send messages of this kind. He thought he was old school or something; all that “sleeps with the fishes” bullshit from the Godfather. This was his typical MO, to send a warning, but in this case, why? To whom?

“Who’s the stiff?” I asked. Yeah, it’s insensitive, but when you are a homicide cop, you see a lot of things that make you insensitive. You have to be insensitive, or you’d go insane. Gallows humor is the order of the day; anything else and you’d go off your rocker.

“Our John Doe is one Sidney Newton, late of Newton’s Accounting. Forty-Seven, married with two teenage children, single man accounting operation, for mom and pop type businesses. Does okay as best we can tell. Lives out in Plymouth with wife, Judy. That’s all we got for now.”

I glanced at her, she was reading off her iPad. She takes notes on an iPad, for Christ’s sake. What’s wrong with note pad and pencil?

Misreading my look, she said, “It’s all in his wallet. Even got pictures of the kids. They looked cute as kids.”

I considered, then asked, “So why has Mr. CPA here suddenly got extra ventilation in the head? Who’d he piss off? The local butchers got angry? Pop him one? What’s the story here?”

“Wish I knew, Hoss,” she replied, closing the cover on the iPad. “Janitorial found him. He has a service, coupla Polish girls; they found him when they stopped by, around elevenish this evening. Had their obvious shock, then called 911. I got here about twenty minutes ago. No witnesses, looks like he works alone. I got pretty much nothin’ else.”

Miranda could be a slack mouth when she was stressed, and she was stressed now. We already had three cases we were looking at, and this would be a fourth, which we just didn’t need. Already, it was plain this wasn’t going to be an open and shut case; it was going to require leg work and shoe leather and all the other crap that “good police work” entailed, and both of us were tired, fed up and already had enough on our plate.

Trouble was, everyone had too much on their plate. The recent gang stuff in the past year tripled the work load; Minneapolis has its issues with crime like any big city, but never like this. We didn’t have a gang unit, so we got lumbered with anything that involved a death, and god knows, there’d been enough of that recently. I know the union had petitioned the mayor’s office to open the coffers a bit, and promote some beat cops to detective, but hey, they all still had to pass the exam, and no one was really studying that hard. Not with all the overtime they could be earning right now...

“I thought Murphy was up tonight?” I asked, scratching my jaw. This case was already making me crazy.

“Yeah, he broke his leg this afternoon. Chasing some kid who’d stolen a bike, of all things. Fuckin’ amateur.”

David Murphy was not a favorite around the squad room. He was incompetent, imagined he was not, and loved Daddy, who happened to be a congressman. The man was a walking, talking, breathing example of the Dunning Kruger effect. So yeah, because of the Daddy connections, we weren’t getting rid of that moron anytime soon. Still, with him and that idiot partner of his not involved, this case actually might be in danger of being solved, a sobering thought!

“Has anyone notified the wife yet?”

“No, I was going to get uniforms to go out there, but then I thought we might do it. You know, look-in-her eye kinda thing?”

I knew what she meant. When you have a case like this, where you have nowhere to start, you wanted every advantage you could get. Being the ones to break the news meant we’d be there to see her reaction, unadulterated. Yeah, it’s heartless and callous, but we needed something to go on, some gut feel. She’d give us a good reaction, one way or the other. It wasn’t nice, but sometimes necessary isn’t nice. Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do to get the result you needed.

Man, sometimes I sound like a bad cop movie. I glanced at my hands to make sure I wasn’t black and white, like some movie from the forties.

I looked over at Miranda, wondering what she thought of the whole thing. I wondered if she thought it stunk? I mean, look at the situation. Who would kill, – no, execute, – a nobody like this? Why the mob style execution? One possibility was that it was to throw people like us off the scent of what had really gone on here. I wondered if Miranda thought the same. Well, plenty of time to talk in the car on the way to interview his widow. I found myself just looking at Miranda. One Miranda Faulkner, age forty, but looked, well, thirty-five, I guess. Been with me her full detective life so far. She had a cute furrow on her brow when she was puzzled, and had a habit of sitting back with a knuckle in her mouth when thinking hard. Five feet ten, almost eye to eye with me, in fact. Frazzled blond hair that no matter what she did it, escaped, and she was constantly pulling wisps out of her face and tucking them behind an ear. Blue eyes, like me, but pale to the point of being ghostly, unlike me, who looks like I have a perpetual tan, courtesy of my years at sea. She was a Nordic lass through and through, born and bred in the area.

I liked her height; it meant when we danced together at official functions I could actually look her in the eye, instead of having to peer down at Clarice. Clarice was just five feet five, and was very aware of it. We had an entire wall of a closet dedicated to three inch and higher heels in her attempts to bridge the height gap.

Not that Clarice and Miranda didn’t get on. Far from it, they were actually fast friends. Miranda had made the effort with Clarice, and Clarice got on with anyone anyway, and when they reached out ... well. In fact, they got on well enough that Clarice called Miranda my ‘work wife’, and I had to be told on more on than one occasion to “down boy,” because of the pornographic threesome movies playing out behind my eyeballs. Clarice knew me way too well. That wasn’t happening, at all. Not only do I not shit where I eat, but Clarice is a “flaming heterosexual,” as she puts it, and Miranda doesn’t go for women like Clarice, anyway. But hell, I’m a guy. It’s nice to think about, once in a while, right?

Miranda caught me looking at her and scowled at me. She had her own things to figure out.

We did all the other things you do at a crime scene, take it in, try and commit to memory all you see, generally let your gut stew on what you saw; usually something doesn’t feel right, or jumps out at you. In this case, beyond the obvious, nothing seemed to. We left, in her car, to go talk to the widow. Not something I was looking forward to, but someone has to do it, and Miranda does have a very calming way about her with things like this.

We talked in the car. I felt her out about what her first impressions were, which were pretty much the obvious conclusion to reach. Mob hit, more than likely. Some message being sent, although what and to whom was anyone’s guess, right now. Maybe we’d find out more from the widow.

It took us about an hour get to his house; it was a nice house, better than mine, for sure. We lived in a three flat, owned the building in fact. We lived in the top floor, no one was currently occupying the middle flat and we had a young college grad in the basement flat. Where Sidney Newton used to live was a bit of a step up. Nice four bedroomed detached house. Current security system, three car garage, manicured lawn, what we could see of it under the snow, the whole middle-America deal.

Caroline Newton though ... well, if there was a central casting call for ‘mousey accountant wife’, she was it. Average height, average build, average complexion, basic hair style ... average everything, in fact.

She came down in a night dress and wouldn’t open the door until we showed her our ID through the chain gap, and even then, she was not pleased to see us. That was prescient.

When we sat her down and explained why we were there, well, she was either worthy of an Oscar, or she was genuinely shocked and surprised. Her eyes kept glancing upstairs, and I initially wondered if she had a man up there, but it soon became clear when a kid of what must have been twelve or thirteen years old came wandering down, calling for her.

She couldn’t really offer us any details on who might have wanted to hurt her husband. I mean, he was a mom & pop accountant; it’s not like he was washing the mob’s money. He’d been working late recently, but then it was the end of the year and tax season was coming up, so he was trying to “get ahead of the rush” - it happened around this time every year. He’d been away at some seminars recently; he went at least eight to ten times a year because “the tax code changes so much, plus he sometimes picked up extra business that the bigger boys didn’t have the bandwidth for.” He didn’t have any particularly close friends, no one she’d heard him mention, but then he didn’t talk about his work very much anyway, because “it was so stupefyingly boring anyway.”

Honestly, the only thing we really got out of the whole interview was a sense that she had nothing to do with whatever had happened to her husband. She was upset and worrying about the future, and her two boys, and didn’t have much else to tell us. No obvious trails to follow up, but that’s about what I expected anyway. You rarely get the obvious clue in the first interview.

We arranged for her to come into the office in a day or so, once she had time to contact a funeral home, which she’d need once we released the body after the automatic autopsy. Then we’d do a more in-depth interview, when we had more specific things to ask her about. Once we established the sequence of events to come with her, we again offered our condolences and then took our leave.

Miranda dropped me by my car and we both headed home, to reconvene the next day at work.

I got in slightly after four am, I was beat and Clarice was still asleep, snoring very gently. I clambered back into the warm bed as quietly as I could and I was away to the land of nod myself, almost instantly.

The next day, I didn’t get into the office till almost noon. Hey, I’d been up till four interviewing people for a murder. I’m entitled to take a bit of time. As it was, I still beat Miranda in by about ten minutes.

I busied myself doing all the usual things - firing off a request for a credit report, asking the DMV for driving records, looking up our victim in the police and FBI databases, all the normal data gathering you do at the start of an investigation. The report from the autopsy and forensics wouldn’t show up until later in the afternoon, but there was plenty to do in the meantime.

When Miranda showed up, I asked her to tidy up the remains of one of the investigations we were already embroiled in: a mechanic had turned up dead, in a lake, and it was evidently foul-play. We’d traced it back to a meth lab we were eighty-five percent sure he was involved in and had spent the earlier part of the previous day staking it out, from information we’d dug up about a possible pick up, but to no avail. No one came near it. I’d taken off at three when it became clear no one was going to show up as we’d been told, got some essential chores out of the way and made it home for dinner before Clarice, for once. I’d even picked up some of her favorite Chinese food. I’m all made of care, ladies.

However, we couldn’t just drop the other case, but now we had this one to deal with first, and it was worth spending at least a couple of days on it while it was fresh. The other one wasn’t going anywhere, so there was no pressing need to be on it.

Eventually around three, the autopsy came in, and I read that, while Miranda read the forensic report, and once we were each done, we switched. There wasn’t that much we didn’t know in either one already. He’d died of head trauma, via a close range .45 bullet. No great revelation there. I had been right in my assumption, and the place was clean. Clinically clean. Either Newton was a neat freak, or our perp was a part time cleaner. No fingerprints on any of the major surfaces, not even on the door, which meant it had been wiped off. That suggested the perp was probably not wearing gloves. No sign of forced entry, so Newton knew or trusted his assailant. No sign of a struggle. No DNA traces the forensic guys could find, no fibers anywhere, no dirty footprints, no disturbances in the blood spats, to indicate someone had blocked the spray with their body. Not much of anything, really. Apart from a very dead body, with the most open mind it’s possible to get.

I just knew this wasn’t going to be an easy case to solve, and the look in Miranda’s eyes was the same.

The only ray of light we had at all was that Newton’s phone had been found by the body, and, wonder of wonders, it was not locked down. Phones these days seem to have more defenses than Fort Knox: fingerprint scanners, facial recognition, personal codes etc. It’s only a matter of time before they need to smell your farts to know it’s you. Newton’s phone was, refreshingly, free of all that. Oh, it had it all, it was just turned off, which was our first piece of luck, or piece of suspicious providence, depending on how you wanted to look at it. Miranda looked at it as us “being given a chance” - although who was giving us this chance the jury was still out on. I had my own opinions, but hey, why shit on her day?

Once we’d read the reports, we dug out the phone. Yeah, we can actually open those phones, even though they are evidence. No point in treating it like gold and not being able to get to what’s on it, right? The case might be blown open with what’s on a phone these days. You’ve gotta use every opportunity that comes your way, no question. So yeah, we went through his phone, even though that’s pretty much digging into the underwear drawer of life.

There wasn’t much interesting to begin with. Those people who salivate at the idea of peering into the deep and dark corners of other’s lives will usually be the first to tell you that often, there’s not that much to see. Some racist comments, usually well disguised. Judgement of others, irrational fears, petty anger. It’s all there. Newton wasn’t alone in that. He wasn’t that fond of his two children, he wished his wife was more into sex, and he had a case of anal sex fascination. While all that was there, there wasn’t that much background to his life. Most of it was local color to who he was, not what he was.

There wasn’t a calendar of appointments. There weren’t any juicy text threads to an illicit girlfriend; in fact, most of the texts he received were from people inquiring of a professional nature. He just didn’t seem to have many friends. Hell, half his contacts started “Mister X” or “Miss Y”, which tells you a lot about how he related to people. From a distance, it would seem. Most disappointing of all, there wasn’t a nice handy email saying, “Hey, by the way, I’m showing up to kill you this evening, please be at work, signed, The Murderer.” That would have helped a lot.

The one thing the tech guys did draw our attention to was a history of Uber trips that Newton had taken recently. That was interesting, because he had a car. He’d go to the office, then use an Uber to go across town, then come back, and he did it fairly regularly. That suggested all sorts of possibilities: a lover, a drug habit, some place he had to go where he didn’t want people to see his vehicle, and I must admit that both Miranda and my own interest was piqued.

We looked up the address, – google maps, bless you, quite a theme here, – and found it was another accountant. Man, this guy really needed to get out more.

Our stiff was visiting another accountant, one Ashton Polka. We did a preliminary dive on this guy, basic website, looked like he was more into blue chip and hedge fund managers kind of work. Bit more upmarket. Well, it was now five-thirty, and I was still tired from the night before, so we called it a day. We’d go visit tomorrow, see what we could scare up.

I went home and had dinner with Clarice. Ahh, Clarice. My rock. Almost twenty years married, she’d married me just after I got out of the academy. I was a late arrival to the force; I didn’t even apply till I was thirty. Before then, I’d been, of all things, a merchant seaman. Ran away from home to sea. I mean, in Minneapolis, we have our own version of “going to see the elephant,” and it involves the high seas and exotic ports. At least that’s what lured me out there.

I could have joined the Navy, but, well, let’s just say that by age eighteen, I was well aware of my own reticence at taking orders without asking why or indeed, respecting anyone at all.

The merchant marines seemed more my speed. I could come and go as I pleased, see the world, learn about it and hell, experience it. Or more accurately, the women. And the booze. And god knows what else. I did it all. How my dick never fell off, I’ve no idea. How I escaped syphilis, gonorrhea, AIDS, all of it, I’ll never know. I must have some guardian angel up there is all I can figure, and by god, he had his hands full. Or she did. Can’t be sexist these days. I know that for a fact, since I’ve had three “gender affirmation” seminars I’ve had to attend just this year.

Anyway, there are other things you learn when you are on a merchant ship, such as being able to handle your own problems. People don’t get it; you are on a ship out in the middle of the ocean, and if things turn pear shaped with a shipmate, there’s no cop out there to report him to. You have to deal with the situation there and then. You have to figure out how to not antagonize people who are easily upset, and be tough enough to cope if you do. Sure, there are laws, but like most laws, there’s only a speed limit when there is a cop around to enforce it.

That went for policing our own, too. I’d been a party to an ... intervention, shall we say, for one crewman from Columbia, who we discovered had “bought” a cabin boy in Hong Kong. We literally only discovered it when someone heard this boy crying in this guy’s room. Technically, it was smuggling, but no one even knew of this boy’s existence, and the state he was in; a ten-year-old, beaten, abused, with no hope in his eyes. Mateo got off on his tears and cries.

Well, we didn’t tell the captain. We just arranged for Mateo to “have an accident,” repeatedly. Mateo vanished during the voyage one evening and the boy was treated with care by the rest of us. I was on duty on the bridge that night, and made sure no one witnessed Mateo’s ignominious end, over the back of the stern, after being beaten unconscious. I didn’t do it, but I sure didn’t stop it from happening, either. No one was going to miss him, that’s for sure. We made sure the boy had his own room with a lock. We wanted to adopt him as official mascot, but the marine company couldn’t have that. He was put ashore in Seattle when we docked there, and put into the system. I made sure to keep track of him and visited when I was stateside. He’s forest ranger somewhere in Oregon these days. I often think of the trade we made, him for Mateo, and I don’t have any regrets.

Sure, stories like that sound blood thirsty, and ignoring due process and law. But sometimes, when you are in the middle of the ocean, days from anywhere, these are things that happen to keep a community functioning. I’m not excusing it; I’m just explaining it. You can judge all you want, but unless you are there, unless you have to make those calls, you don’t really understand what it is to be in that situation.