shake every tree
Who: Danny and Brett
Where: ECPD
When: late morning
Danny was reluctant to leave Janey this morning, still worried about her and hating letting her out of his sight for fear he’d have to go through what he’d gone through the night before again. Once he did manage to pull himself away his focus changed, now set on finding the person responsible for hurting his wife and leading him to believe that she might have died in the park. He was sober and for once not reaching for his flask, instead he had blinders on, headed for Brett’s desk with energy he rarely mustered this early in the morning. “Tell me you know something more than we did last night.”
Brett looked up and reached for a file, handing it over to Danny. "Can give you the names of the dead so far, though there's another two in the hospital that probably won't last out the day, according to reports," he said, unsmiling. "Uniforms have lodged all the witness reports they got from talking to everyone in the park and at the hospital, but they pretty much amount to the fact that nobody saw shit. Nothing's really come off the crime scene. We've got units out today trawling the local area for sign of any launch pad for the attack. The one thing the reports did tell us is that those spikes came in bulk, which suggests that whatever launched them had to have been fairly big. So there's only going to be so many places that it could have been. Hopefully."
Danny sat across from Brett, looking at what was on his desk, trying to read it upside down. “All at once? Like...some sort of fucked up scatter shot?” he asked, not able to come up with anything else that he could compare it to. “So if it was far away, that means that whoever did it, launched it off then left, no need to actually even see what he did?”
“Who the fuck knows,” Brett growled, turning the document round so Danny could see it, since he seemed so much more interested in Brett’s notes than the file he’d just been offered. His ire wasn’t directed at the other cop so much as the situation in general and Brett's own natural impatience. “Witnesses all tend to say the same thing - the rods came out of the sky. So, running theory is the arc - something arced them down, from somewhere, for them to hit that way. And in a wave pattern. And those things got up pretty high, came down pretty fast. So something had to have been around to throw them, hard, from somewhere. We’re not talking about the Olympic fucking javelin here.”
Danny skimmed the notes, seeing essentially what Brett had said, then reached for the previously neglected. “So something shot it...all of them..and fast. We got that much. As far as I know, nothing outside of science fiction stories works like that. Unless we’re talking a barrage of cannons or something.” Could cannon’s shoot stakes? Danny was way out of his element here. Brett’s curtness was ignored as Danny flipped through the file. He wasn’t in a much better mood himself, even less so knowing they had nowhere to even start. “Where we at on this being tied into that Konovich murder yesterday morning?”
“We’re not,” Brett admitted with a sigh. “All we got is that both of them, the victims were impaled by fucking metal spikes, or poles - not even the same type. Could just be coincidence. Just seems really fucking... If that’s coincidence? I don’t want to see what’s going to pop up next.” He shook his head and reached for another file. “Which is, by the way, the docks - apparently there was a shootout last night. Whole faction of the Jade Lotus gt gunned down just as their latest shipment was coming in down at the docks last night, along with a couple of white John Does who we haven’t managed to get IDed yet. Publicly, the department’s taking credit for the bust, of course,” he said, rolling his eyes at that latest bit of fiction. “Since the drugs were left as is and they scraped them up. But looking through the actual reports and this has mafia hit written all over it. And how that connects into the murders in the park? It doesn’t - except that i predicted yesterday that both fucking mobs are going to be screaming murder today and I think we’re seeing the opening shots of a fucking war zone out there.”
Danny took the new folder, eyes a little wide before he flipped through it. “A war zone. Started by gunning down some nobody in one family and a group of church goers in the park. People aren’t going to be able to leave their houses at this rate,” he commented. He rubbed his forehead for a moment as he looked at the file in his hands, details of who was dead and who wasn’t. “Any family names dead at the park?”
“Bingo - and there you have the gold star,” Brett said, reaching over and dropping a file at a time as he spoke. “Mrs High-Up Di Giovanni herself. Straight through the head as her teenaged daughter looked on. Rudolph Stephanov, rumoured to be second in command in the Syndicate right now. Or, until yesterday, anyway, when he decided to attend the vigil at the request of his wife-” Another folder hit the desk. “-Katerina. And his three children-” Three more folders joined those, one for each name. “Petra, twelve; Andrei, nine and Keska, five. All dead. And we’re just getting started. Seems that the cathedral was one place where family ties took a back seat.”
“Please tell me you’re fucking kidding me,” Danny said as the files stacked on top of each other. Brett was right about the church, Danny had seen them there, mingling together without actually mingling. He ran a hand through his short hair and shook his head. “Vigilante then? It’s the only...who’s got beef with all the families though? If the Jade were taken out too, there’s not anyone else left really. Is there?” Danny didn’t work the crime families that much unless he was cleaning up their dead bodies, but with the O’Malleys mostly run underground or dead, who else was left?
“You want facts backed by proof, or just supposition and belief?” Brett asked, knowing there was a difference. With his background, he knew more about organised crime in this city than most cops did, but proof was something that came so very rarely. Even if the names were known, nothing could actually be made to stick against most people. Hell, that was evidenced even on the lower levels with the fact that Patrick O’Malley was still walking free. The high ups of the mobs were pretty much untouchable. Even the force hadn’t been able to take down the O’Malleys - that had had to be orchestrated another way. of course, corruption had had a hand in that little problem.
Danny considered it then picked up the file for the kids that had been killed. There was nothing to say that they weren’t doomed to walk in their parents’ shoes, but death before they turned eighteen seemed a little over the top. “Supposition and belief. We’re getting nowhere with facts.”
“Okay - the Syndicate is divided into several arms in the city. And, on a larger scale, it has its roots in Russia. High ups in Eidolon don’t truly run the show. So, you kill them off and, sooner or later they’ll be replaced. But, anyhow, it’s not just the Russians. They make deals, associations, with other groups that can be of use to them. In Eidolon, it’s the O’Malleys - or was. The Jade Lotus, who control most of the Syndicate’s smuggling operations. There’s the Cusicks, who deal pretty much in prostitution these days - their legitimate faced is the Kitten Club, by the way. I know less about the DiGiovanni. Just that they, as an organisation, are much more independent within the city. And more traditionally family oriented. But it’s not just the DiGios. There’s other families in there to. I heard whispers, but where with the Syndicate I have knowledge but no proof, with the DiGios, I really do just have rumour. DiGiovanni, Giocomo. Hell, I heard the Walkers mentioned more than once.”
Danny was a little surprised at the wealth of knowledge but did his best to follow along. Many of the family names sounded familar, if only from their minor arrests. Never anything to hold them long enough. “We’ve had major hits on most of the families, if not all, depending on how closely tied the DiGiovannis are to their other families. Who would take out all of them. We’re looking at someone nuts, shooting into a crowd, or we’re looking at targets that happened to be with innocent bystanders. Having a motive is a lot easier than tracking a crazy person.”
“Isn’t that just it - we have no idea if we’re dealing with one of the sides that doesn’t care if they take out their own; or a random crazy. Or, hell - a third fucking organisation that we don’t even know about yet. There’s neutral players in this town. Mostly, they keep under the radar, or they don’t register on the same page, but what if one of them decided to try for the big leagues? this could be something else. And we just. Don’t. Know.” Brett’s frustration sounded in his voice. he was entirely committed to this, even if he felt the were getting nowhere. A week ago, and he’d sworn that he’d never be a cop ever again. And yet here he was. He’d re-entered the force for reasons that weren’t even valid any more, and yet now that he’d made that decision, he was giving the job his all. That was just who he was.
Danny was getting just as frustrated. “Well we can’t just sit here and do nothing. We’ve got ideas and possible directions to go in we run down them. It’s better than sitting here trying to figure out who the hell is going to get killed again.” His voice was gruff and his eyes were serious. Danny didn’t even want Janey to leave the fucking house and if some crazy with a god complex was out there killing innocents then Danny wanted his hands around the guy’s throat. It it was some family with beef he wanting to pull them down, watch everything crumble under them. “Pick somewhere to start and we’ll get going.”
Less than two weeks back on the force and already people were turning to him for decisions. Brett guessed that was the downside of sounding like you knew what you were talking about. “Fine - you go down to the coroner’s office. See if they can tell you anything more about the bodies. hell - I don’t know what those guys can do, but the witness statements sure don’t tell us anything. We know that whatever did this wasn’t small. Can they, I don’t know - tell us anything at all that might point us in the right direction with where this bastard was? I’ll go down town. I still have some snitches that might tell me something. I’ll start turning over stones, see if I can find some worms that’ll bite, see if there’s any rumours going round about who did this.” He paused before finally asking, “How’s your wife?”
The coroner’s office Danny could do, especially since his snitches around town weren’t likely to be of much help. Petty theft and street beefs maybe, but nothing sort of thing. Brett was bound to have better contacts. Danny grabbed the files on the dead people, at least those with family names and nodded. “I can ask around with the petty crimes lot too. Larceny and the like. See if anyone small’s been trying to make name for themselves and might be interested in going big.” When Brett asked about Janey, Danny halted, composure shifting for a moment. “She’s shaken up. One of the stakes nearly took off her arm, but she made it out mostly unscathed, just a few stitches and enough nightmares to last her the rest of our lives.”
Brett had read the report on Janey since he’d got in, but he’d still wanted to hear it from Danny himself, get his take on it. “You holding out okay?” he checked.
Danny didn’t answer that right away. He was, for the most part, alright, but that didn’t make what he was dealing with any easier. “Let’s just find this son of a bitch.” And then leave Danny in a room alone with him for a while and see where Danny was holding out after that.
“Deal,” Brett agreed, finally standing. “Everyone shakes every tree they can. If we have to haul in every single citizen, we’re going to catch this fucker. We just better do it quickly - because the fallout’s not going away,” he said, reaching for his hat and coat. After all, there was no time like the present.