Now

Ellie decided that the captain must have read Kramer in on her plans, because the big detective had called her from his hospital bed.  He gave her a list of things that she was and was not allowed to tell her expert- he just couldn’t leave it alone, she thought- and she thanked him, all the while gnawing at her tongue so as not to tell him what she really thought.

Then she took Kramer’s demands to the captain.  It was a calculated risk; Kramer’s career had pretty much stalled, which suggested that he was in bad odor with the people at the highest echelons of police hierarchy.  Kramer still had allies on the force- including the lieutenant who was their immediate superior- but the captain outranked the LT and was a good cop, besides.

Captain Jefferson was a burly man in his early fifties; he had a jowly face and thick, bushy eyebrows that made him look slightly Neanderthal.  Combined with his middle-aged paunch, she thought he looked like just about every satirist’s depiction of Deputy Dawg she had ever seen, but his eyes were bright and his mind was quick and sharp.  He took a brief look at Kramer’s demands, looked at her, then deliberately crumpled the paper into a ball and pitched it at his wastebasket.

“Are you a good cop, Martinez?” he asked her.  His voice was deceptively mild.

“Yessir,” she said, “I think so.”

“Horseshit,” he snorted, “you know you are.  Is Kramer a good cop?”

She hesitated and he waved a hand.

“Don’t answer that, Martinez, I already know.  He’s a political hack.  Kramer’s laid up in a hospital bed and he dumped his problem in your lap.  Furthermore, he gave you a set of orders that leaves you hamstrung when he needs to be covering your ass so you have freedom to move.

“Go take care of your business, Sergeant; I’ll protect you from the fallout.”

“Yessir,” she said again, and added, “Thank you, sir.”

“Get out of here,” he growled, “You’re interrupting my coffee.”

She retreated and headed down the stairs.

Dr. Kaslow was waiting at her desk when she got there; it felt odd, looking across the cluttered surface to the space where Harry Trafalgar should have been sitting and realizing that he wouldn’t be back in that chair for months, if ever.

Out of his lab coat, Kaslow looked even more like a misplaced college professor.  She guessed that she’d dragged him out of bed, because his shirt was rumpled and his plaid jacket looked like it had spent the night folded over the back of a chair.  He was cleaning his spectacles as she walked up, and he shoved them back onto his face in order to shake her hand.

“Thank you for stopping by, Dr. Kaslow,” Ellie said, extending her hand.  He clasped it uncertainly and she gave it a quick shake.

“What can I help you with, Sergeant?”

“I understand your background is in virology and infectious diseases?” she asked and the doctor bobbed his head affirmatively.

Ellie led the doctor over to an empty briefing room and spread a map of Angel Falls out on a table.  She laid a transparency over the map.  “This shows incidents of violent crime in Angel Falls in the last two years,” she explained.  Ellie had selected two years because this case had a feeling of maturity to it, but it didn’t feel like it was quite finished, yet.  It felt, she thought, like she was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Kaslow looked at the map, but didn’t say anything.

She placed her next transparency on top of the first.  “This shows the locations and quantities of Boost we’ve recovered.  Again, this goes back two years, and every incident is dated.”

Ellie laid out her last transparency.  “This is an extrapolation based on the locations of violent crimes and the locations of Boost busts; it assigns a reliability index to the possibility of crimes being Boost-related.”

Dr. Kaslow quirked his eyebrow at Ellie.  “I assume you have raw data for me, as well?” he asked and she nodded.  “Very well.”

He studied the table.  “I will want to see your data,” he added, “but something seems odd about this distribution.”

“Yeah,” she agreed, “that’s what I thought-”

“Don’t be too hasty,” he cautioned her, “all of your data is dependent on seized assets and crime statistics that may not be temporally relevant.”

He saw Ellie’s confusion.  “What I mean is that you may not have captured or intercepted your Boost activities in chronological order.  In any case, the shape is still wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“I would expect to see a more circular pattern, possibly with secondary epicenters somewhat removed from the main body of effects and with hotspots occurring in heavily populated urban areas.  I’m not sure that the social factors would work the same for a drug as for a disease, but it seems like a fairly reasonable assumption.”

“Yeah,” she agreed, “that’s what I thought, too.”

“The pattern I’m seeing, though… it looks like a cone, and the spread is a fan, not a sphere.  I would guess that distribution of the drug is more highly controlled than would normally be expected of a contagion, which suggests that it is not being marketed for profit- at least, not yet.”

Ellie stared at the map.  “I can’t see it, doc,” she admitted finally, “show me?”

Kaslow made a mou, then pointed to an area spreading out around St. Stephan’s Chruch.  “These incidents appear, with one exception, to be the most recent ones.  They are spread over a fairly wide area, but not an unmanageably large one.  I am discounting incidents with a reliability index of less than sixty percent, by the way, which considerably narrows the area and pattern.”

She looked and saw what he was talking about.  “Why sixty percent?” Ellie asked curiously.

“Convenience, mostly,” he explained, “too much lower, and the chance of unrelated activities polluting the data corrupts the picture; much higher and there are too few data points to get an accurate picture.”

“I see.”

“Now, look at this pattern.  Ignore the dates, for now, but notice how these incidents have progressively higher reliability as you approach the vertex, here in Lonely Point.  This suggests that the greatest control of distribution is being effected in this area and that control becomes looser or more difficult the further you get from there.

“Going back to the dates, I also note that while the dates span a much wider range as you travel towards the vertex, the farther out you go, the more recent the earliest dates they become.”

“Okay, doc,” Ellie agreed, “but what does it mean?”

“Mean, Sergeant?” Kaslow inquired.

She waited and the doctor cleared his throat and tugged at his collar.  “I hate to speculate,” he hedged, “but I would guess that whatever is being done is a carefully monitored experiment of some sort.  It is most likely being directed by some forward base out here in this area-” his finger swept around an area that included Icon Religious Supplies- “and a secondary- or perhaps primary- control somewhere near here, in Lonely Point.”  This time, he indicated an area that included a portion of the naval base.

“Hm,” Ellie considered.  “Thank you, doctor,” she added absently.  As the doctor turned to leave, another thought occurred to her.  “Just a second, doc,” she called.  He turned around and plodded back to her.  “Let’s assume that, whatever this is about, it’s not just about drug smuggling.”

“That seems like a safe assumption,” the doctor agreed.

“So… what is it about?  And where’s it going to happen?”

“I can’t answer your first question,” Kaslow admitted, “because there are too many variables.  As to the second, though… given that this has the earmarks of some sort of social experiment, I would expect the… let’s call it the culminating event... would occur in a population dense area near to the operation center.  I would focus my attention of the naval base itself, probably in the barracks where recruits are housed.”

Ellie frowned.  “No,” she decided, and the doctor looked at her in surprise.  “Oh, we’ll watch ‘em,” she reassured him, “but I think the real meltdown will be… here.”  Her finger stabbed down at the South River State Penitentiary.

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As will be explained later in the story, there's a reason Ellie makes a good cop, and a lot of it comes from her ability to see the obvious and connect the dots- at least, she's good at that once the obvious is pointed out to her...  Captain Jefferson was originally a mash-up of the police captain in Bad Boys and the one in Lethal Weapon 3- I am convinced to this day that Steve Kahan is the only real police captain in Hollywood, regardless of his lack of law enforcement experience- and I kind of love the gruff, wise-mentor role he plays, even if it is only for a tiny piece of the story.  No bio for him, since he's not a major player and probably never will be, but he was still fun to write.  And, finally, Kramer continues to be a PITA- it'd be nice if something permanent happened to him, wouldn't it?  Don't get your hopes up, though- he's the kind of reptile that gets through everything and always turns up looking (and smelling) like roses.

This picture- and all the artwork for Shooting stars- is brought to you by the amazingly talented and lovely .

Shooting Stars is an epic tale (okay, maybe that's pushing it, but I've always wanted to call something I wrote an epic) taking place in  and will feature characters by , , and an appearance of Esau by .

Sergeant Eleanora Martinez, Captain Jefferson, Detective Kramer, Detective Harry Trafalgar, and Doctor Kaslow all belong to .

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