When the House Burns by Priscilla Paton

Author:Priscilla Paton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Epicenter Press Inc.
Published: 2023-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 22

Wednesday, morning bliss forgotten, stuck in lunch hour traffic where the Crosstown met I-35, Erik fought stomach pangs and road rage. Halted in his travels by an accident ahead, halted in the Nerstrand case by a lack of progress, he stewed.

In the week that he and Deb had been on the case, no leads had led anywhere. Patrol officers in the area had been alerted to Homeless Ulysses—no sightings. Deb continued to seek “unknown lovers,” but known male contacts of Jean had been cleared. No evidence had popped up of a random shooter. In their morning video confab, Deb and Erik reviewed which steps of the investigation left them most unsatisfied. They landed on last Friday’s interview with Dominic Novak. “Novak’s the wild goose you should chase,” Deb had said between hair yanks. “Employ that twisty mind of yours. Find a conspiracy he’s in and—this is the important part—find out if it involved Jean.”

A state trooper on foot was waving vehicles to pull up right next to lane dividers and into rough construction areas to make way for a tow truck. A waiting driver leaned out the window to spit out obscenities. The trooper ignored him and signaled the truck to back up to a crumpled sedan. Another driver flipped the bird to the trooper’s back.

As law enforcement, Erik was accustomed to receiving messages of hate and revilement. The police system bore the burden of history’s sins and too often worsened that burden with crimes against the marginalized. On one of the crimes, Erik had yet to forgive himself. He had no direct involvement, merely suspicions about a white Minneapolis policeman, Meshbesser. Erik had interviewed Meshbesser about his former service partner’s bad behavior, and by implication Meshbesser’s own questionable acts. Meshbesser stonewalled. Later, during the Time of Terrible Living, Meshbesser had given the go-ahead for a no-knock entry of a house where a Black woman had been shot and killed. The address had been wrong: the murder suspect’s house had been numbered 3178, not 3718, and dispatch called through a last-minute correction, but Meshbesser wouldn’t listen. He swore he knew there were suspicious activities at this address, charged in, and Meshbesser’s partner, on the force for five days, panicked at the sight of the woman—holding what turned out to be her phone—and shot her.

The only grounds Erik had for reporting Meshbesser before the fatal shooting was the officer’s bad attitude. If bad attitude were a crime, we’d all be in jail.

But bad attitude can lead to hate crimes. Just when Erik felt he could feel whole again after his divorce, his beloved city went up in flames and came down in ruins. He had never considered himself an urbanite—his true home the outdoors—but it tore him up to see the Twin Cities ravaged. He wasn’t utterly surprised when the Third Precinct burned down, a target of outrage and violent opportunism. Later rocks crashed through Fifth Precinct windows with high-charge fireworks thrown at officers. The site of his first placement as a patrol officer.

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