Free Die-Off by Kirk Russell

getting a suspect to talk.
    ‘Get going, Rich,’ Harknell said in a stronger voice. ‘The warden and I will still be here.’
    The sheriff winked at Marquez.
    ‘You and I both know Rich already stripped the files. I’m surprised there’s anything left for you to read.’
    Voight left the office fuming and headed out on a walk which took him straight to his car. He drove over to the Burger King, bought coffee and then a bite to eat, a breakfast burrito, a large order of hash browns, and two sausage biscuits. This whole set-up was wrong and he knew Marquez sensed it. That’s why he showed up so early.
    Questioning him would run through lunch and maybe a lot longer, so it made sense to eat something now. He ate sitting in his car in the sun and then drove the route he was going to say he had walked. As he did, he turned the idea of quitting the department and suing the sheriff. Harknell was way out of bounds ordering him to go walk and it was incredible that his life had come to this, working for this pompous bastard who treated Siskiyou County as a private fiefdom. He finished the last of the coffee and biscuits and walked through the moves with Marquez one more time in his head before parking and going back in.
    Marquez’s stepdaughter, Maria, was key in this. She communicated on Facebook with Ellis and Steiner and somehow, he didn’t know precisely how yet, the right information got passed on to Marquez. It let him build his cover and claim he was looking for a suspect the day he showed up at the town meeting and met the girls. He was supposed to be on an undercover buy but instead he was in a high-school gym with Ellis and Steiner and other people who didn’t have to work for a living and could sit around and debate freeing the Klamath River by taking down dams.
    Late that night the girls were attacked along a dirt road by the Klamath River. Next day Marquez shows up after the bodies were found. They put out a ‘be-on-the-lookout’ call to all law enforcement for a suspect vehicle and within an hour Marquez is at the crime scene. Siskiyou County has six thousand miles of road and with something like this it takes everybody, but Marquez showing up at the scene was strange.
    Voight shook the crumbs off his shirt and coat and when some of them fell on the seat between his legs he lifted himself high enough off the seat to brush a hand under and wipe it clean. That jammed the steering wheel into his gut. He didn’t like the weight he had gained or the sad despair that seemed to dominate his nights and he was alone too much. He didn’t like it that he didn’t just tell the sheriff to go fuck himself; didn’t like what he was willing to take to keep the job.
    He hadn’t solved the Ellis and Steiner murders or gotten anywhere on a recent homicide, three months ago when a young man was beaten, kicked and stomped to death by two men. He had good leads on that one that he hadn’t gotten anywhere at all. All three had been in the bar drinking and argued and still he hadn’t solved it.
    Last week Harknell had asked him to take a ride with him and tell him where things were at on that one. The parents of the young man killed were people he knew. The county only had forty-four thousand people in it, but it was bigger than three US states, something the sheriff seemed to forget. It was a lot of territory to cover, though it did bother Voight that he didn’t seem to have the stamina he once had or the clarity of mind.
    He had turned into a note taker – and worse, having written something down, having both heard it or read it and written it down, he still needed to look at the notes later. That never happened when he was younger and he knew the sheriff was looking at him sideways now, thinking of making changes. A deputy, an ambitious Iraq vet who wanted his job, kissed the sheriff’s ass every day.
    Voight cleaned the Burger King litter out of the car and walked it over to the trash barrel before going back in. He knew