The Alibi (A John Chance Mystery) – Chapter 12 (was Chapter 6 long, long ago, now modified)

The Alibi – Chapter 12

 
Cranston stopped at the doors to the precinct’s central office. John Rhinehold knelt beside Cranston’s desk. Rhinehold was the latest edition to the BPD’s undercover cybersecurity squad. Undercover Cranston could get. Rhinehold, too-thin for that tall a frame with an unruly, bushy black beard and always in a tshirt and jeans no matter the weather, looked like an early to mid-twenties heroin addict desperate for his next score. But that’s where the undercover aspect ended. That thick, long braid got caught in drawers, doors, was long enough to strangle him and was the perfect handhold for someone wanting to do damage to Rhinehold’s head.

His head popped up and watched Cranston’s screen light up. Rhinehold smiled, stood, and his head fell back as some cables came up with him, his hair snaked in among them.

Cranston shook his head as Rhinehold extricated himself. Leddy’s ring sounded from his mobile. “POPS?”

He TXTed back. “K U?”

The precinct’s wall mounted blues flashed ON-ON-off ON-ON-off. Chairs screeched across the hardwood floor.

Leddy TXTed “C THS?” and Cranston’s attention returned to his phone. Leddy sent her video through. “SIMON GOT IT ALL!”

SIMON. Situational Intelligent MONitor. She sent him pictures at every stage of SIMON’s development and he had them made into a tshirt collage with the heading “Leddy’s Little Project.”

She loved it.

But “SIMON GOT IT ALL!”?

She had it working?

He needed to pay more attention during dinners.

Its cameras moved through hazy clouds flecked with ash. He wasn’t sure what he was seeing until the drone cleared the clouds. It flew just above street level and revealed the clouds as billowing smoke.

“WRU”

“BPL Johnson w Pen.”

Cranston’s jaw tightened briefly. He didn’t like to interfere in Leddy’s friendships. Getting into that special high school MIT-Harvard thing really made her blossom. She hadn’t been able to focus on anything since her mother passed five years back. Cranston knew his daughter was special, used his connections to get her time with top grief counselors and therapists, but it wasn’t until Penny Lane and her father, Briggs, that Leddy got into the program.

She didn’t make the cut and the reason infuriated him more than her; she didn’t meet their BIPOC or LGBTQ diversity requirements. “Was that a requirement for all the white kids who got in?”

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The Alibi (A John Chance Mystery) – Chapter 11 (was Chapter 8 long, long ago, now modified)

The Alibi – Chapter 11

 
Briggs Lane stood at the window of his Lane, Cuomo, and Greenberg top-floor corner office. He held a pair of MIL710 Optical Enhancers to his eyes and focused on Innovation Square. “That stupid bastard. Didn’t he know enough not to shit where he eats?”

He placed the MIL710s back in their padded box, placed that in a desk drawer, closed the drawer, and pressed his thumb against what appeared to be a lock. The drawer hissed as the desk sucked it a microscopic inch or two further in and sealed it in place.

He stepped around his desk – mahogany and large enough to play shuffleboard on – and past a five hundred gallon salt-water reef tank dominating a windowless wall and custom made by a team from the New England Aquarium in exchange for time, materials, and an anonymous ten million dollar donation towards unspecified marine research.

A post-doc from NEAQ came in once a week to make sure the tank and its highly illegal denizens were in good order. Lane ran his hand along the side of the tank and something flashed out from under the reef. It smashed itself against the tank’s clear acrylic wall and Lane smiled down at the circular rows of teeth before continuing on to the wall opposite his desk. Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa hung there. He smiled, lifted his fingers to his lips, kissed then touched his fingers to the carving’s frame.

The wall opened and revealed what Lane’s deep intimates referenced as variously “the weapons locker,” “the Predators’ trophy array,” and “Elon Musk’s wish list.”

That last one always gave Lane a chuckle.

Musk was an ass.

Never invited Briggs to any parties, never accepted Lane’s invitations to dinner when he was in Boston.

What a fucking ass.

Lane lifted a smallish disco dance club’s glitterball from its birth in the hidden compartment to reveal a small, gold nameplate with HIVE engraved on it.

Lane turned the glitterball over and placed his hand inside. A moment later the HIVE – a prototype Human Immersion Visual-audio Enhancer – hummed and Lane fitted it over his head.

The HIVE’s separate facets, much like an insect’s compound eyes, captured video-audio feeds from whatever was available – a newscast, a store camera, municipal video, people livestreaming, devices uploading to the cloud – and built a real-time 3D immersive environment for the wearer. Tilt your head forward and you walked forward, lean forward and you ran, turn your head and you saw from side to side, tilt your head back and you looked up, down was down and so on.

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And Deer are such dears, as well

All of The Wild are precious to us.

Some are more deer than others.

Clever way I did that. Did you notice?

Either a pun or a misspelling, depending how gracious you are to me.

Or how much of a yutz you think I am.

We’ve been graced by Deer as of late.

And it’s always joyous when they join us.

 

The Alibi (A John Chance Mystery) – Chapter 10 (was part of Chapter 5 long, long ago. Maybe this is an example of authorial inflation?)

The Alibi – Chapter 10

 
William “Bill” Cranston grabbed the railing as he jogged up the stairs to Precinct House 17. He may have been a linebacker in college, but that was thirty-five years ago and now he needed to pull himself up inclines when he jogged them.

He snapped his hand back as if he touched a high-tension line.

The railing was shaking?

Sure, ’17 was one of the oldest precinct houses in Boston, still brick-and-mortar as they say, and with wide-paneled hardwood floors and high ceilings and big fans hanging down because putting AC in a building about to be decommissioned was a waste of tax dollars, but that decommissioning order had been on the books for twenty years Cranston knew of once. The city discovered it would cost more to put up a new precinct house rather than get rid of this old one, but somehow the money set aside for a new precinct house never made it into a working AC system.

Cranston made it a point to dig deep whenever he had to investigate a city or state official. He was going to write a book once he retired. Fuckers I have known, he was going to call it.

Old or not, ’17 was still solid. granite anchored the railings. They could shake? Like that?

He looked up and down the street. No fifty-three foot TT or heavy construction vehicles in sight, but dogs barked and pulled on their leashes. Pigeons, robins, and starlings took flight. The leaves on sidewalk maples, willows, and elms shivered as if chilled by a late October wind.

He touched the railing tentatively, one finger stretched forward, his body slightly turned and ready to pull away.

Nothing.

He shrugged and continued up the stairs. The desk sergeant looked up and nodded as he entered.

“You feel that?”

The desk sergeant shook her head. “Feel what?”

Cranston continued up the next flight to the offices. His phone vibrated in his pocket. A moment later he heard his daughter Leddy’s distinctive TXT ring and read the screen. “U OK?”



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