Cold Case

The Catacombs

Chapter one

The Catacombs

Blue grabbed a cup of coffee at the donut shop around the corner from the police station. She always chuckled at how strategically they placed their donut business; I guess they assumed the police would always want their donuts. She walked back toward the station but wasn't in no hurry. She was usually early for work, so she knew she had plenty of time.

As she was entering the building, Ramirez, her part-time partner joined her and asked her about her date the night before. "How did it go Blue? Any fireworks happening for you?" Ramirez always tried to get her set up with a man. He himself was a married man and he loved his wife dearly. He only ever wanted Blue to be as happy as he was.

"Well, I guess it was going well until his mom called him and he had to actually go to her house because she felt like someone was watching her through the window." She recalled the memory.

"No he didn't?"

"Oh yes, yes he did. That was bad, but when he asked if I could stay at the restaurant and wait for him, I wanted to slug him. I shouldn't want to slug my date should I?" The laughter was pouring out now out of her.

"No, usually you wouldn't want to do that. Damn Blue, where do you find these fellows? It's not like you're a bad looking girl, there has to be someone out there for you." He kidded her because in all honesty, Blue was hot like fire. Her auburn hair, when let out of the bun, would flow long and curly down her back. She knew Ramirez wished her only the best and never thought of her in any other way than in a sisterly, partner kind of way. The love of his life was at home with their three children. His only job was to make it home safe to them everyday.

"I'll keep trying  Diego, but I am not getting my hopes too high for anything. Some people just are meant to be alone." She smiled but underneath the pain started to creep in.

They walked into the precinct together and headed toward their prospective offices. Blue had very little in the way of personal effects. The room was bare save for the one picture she happened to get with her favorite country singer. Yes, she was a country music fan. She lived in San Antonio, Texas after all, what else would you expect?

She sat at her desk and put the finishing touches on the file of the case she just closed. It was a twenty two year old murder of a thirteen year old girl. The girl had gotten off the bus and never made it home. Seventeen days later, they found her body in a patch of wood just outside San Antonio, on the bank of Cibolo Creek. She had been rolled up in a brown tarp and just dumped without a second thought. A young life wiped out in a blink of an eye. The person who was just indicted for the murder was a man who was a teenager at the time. He had liked her but she did not return the feelings.

The other case she is working on was the assassination of a public official from 1993. They had a suspect in mind, and she was certain that an arrest was going to be imminent. So, since they did, she felt confident that she could open another cold case and start to work on that. She grabbed her coffee and headed for the catacombs, the massive archives of cold cases whose aisles stretched the length of the block. Before going down, Blue grabbed her sweater because even though she lived in Texas, it was cold down there. And Blue never just picked a case. She fumbled through files for hours trying to decide which one to bring out. Slowly, Blue opened and closed file after file, disturbing decades old dust which made her start to sneeze. She passed up cases of armed robbery, car jackings, kidnappings, among others but nothing called out to her, nothing grabbed her. Finally, after several hours of looking, she found a case where a housewife was found dead in the bathtub and their main suspect was her husband, of course. The case was ten years cold but something about it appealed to her; it was probably the fact that the housewife was six months pregnant. She grabbed the boxes of evidence and loaded it on to a cart she could take up the elevator. There wasn't a lot, but maybe fresh eyes would find something the original investigators missed.