Not to the Swift

Chapter 13

"It's been a week, Rodriguez," Chris Mason's voice growled through the phone. "I thought you said you were there to help me out."

Candida Rodriguez weaved between desks on the operations floor, cell in one hand, Mason's file in the other. Captain's got to see this before someone drops a FOIA on our heads. But I don't know how we spin this little tidbit of information.

"Mason, please." She rolled her eyes. "These things take time if we're going to do it right. The wounds are still raw. There's talk of protests in the community. Heck, the family just buried the kid."

"I know, I know," Chris's voice answered. "It's just—I could be helping somehow."

Candida stopped outside the captain's office and checked her watch. "I am working on your case, Mason. I won't promise you a timeframe, because I have no idea."

Captain McCullough waved her into his office, but she gestured with a finger toward the phone and mouthed, "Just a minute."

"Everything is fluid, Mason. This could go a few different ways, most of them not good."

"Yeah, I hear you, standby to standby."

Candida cocked her head, losing patience. "What's your problem, Mason?"

"I want to get back to doing my job, that's all."

"Okay, well I think Stapleton has seen enough of you doing your job for a while, don't you? It's time for you to sit back, shut up, and let me do mine."

"And what's that?"

"Fixing your mess." She hung up the phone.

Captain McCullough greeted her with a smile. "What you got, Candi? Good news?"

"Only for the protestors."

"Crap." He noted the folder in her hand. "What now?"

Candida flipped open the section for training records. "You know how no one really looks at Academy results if a new transfer's moved past their first assigned station? You might want to change that policy."

The captain skimmed through the computer-generated data and scores. His eyes narrowed as he read the paragraphs of documentation written by the Academy instructors.

"Oh my god," he said. "The community leaders pushing for more protests would have a field day with this."

"A field month, more like." Candida dropped the open folder on his desk. "You need to work on a way to spin this. We can hope it doesn't come up, maybe even stall a bit if a Freedom of Information Act comes through the channels. But you'll want to have something prepared, just in case. This raises questions that have to be answered."

Captain McCullough stared at the page and shook his head. "Got any thought on that?"

"Not one damn bit. But I'll mull it over, see what I can come up with."

The captain opened a file on his computer. "Well, I got something for you at least. Something important to the case."

Candida raised an eyebrow. "Really. I love surprises."

"Mason's body cam gave us a pretty big problem," the captain said. "We had good audio, but no way to show what Mason deemed worthy of armed response. So really all we got from that is the kid's friend accusing Mason of shooting an unarmed teenager in cold blood."

"Right, I've reviewed the tape several times."

"Well we went back to the scene and found one of the local residents had a low-grade off the shelf security camera set up outside his home. The resident cooperated with us, thankfully. Want to see the video?"