Free At the Scene of the Crime by Dana Stabenow Page A

recruiting them. Right away the guys started testing her, seeing how available she might be. Married, unmarried, didn’t matter. It’s a thing guys do. I should say here I never saw our commander flirt or kid in any way that made it seem Erin was anything but another trooper.
     
    Commander Paul Ooten’s a real family man. That’s what I heard all the time. I’d seen him with his family at a state patrol picnic once. Pretty wife. Two kids, about eight, ten.
    And I saw him one night, behind a motel near Tannersville, coming down the stairs from the second floor, Trooper Flannery in front of him.
    I had just gotten in my car after coming out of a restaurant. Parked perpendicular to the restaurant, nose in to the motel, I went to wipe moisture off the side mirror and then looked up. At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. The light over the staircase and landing was fuzzy from moist air. The couple had long coats on. I watched them walk over patchy snow to her car. She got in, and a different light, coming from the motel sign near the street, hit her face, brighter, paler. Paul shut her door. She rolled down the window, and he leaned over and kissed her, then stood watching as she pulled away.
    The next day I had a hard time looking at him.
     
    A couple of weeks later, I was at my desk on a weekend. I had off, but my review was coming up and I had to get some overdue paperwork in. Ooten’s door was open. Half of him was visible through the doorway, cut vertically, or I’d see him when he’d get up to go to his file cabinet.
    Bill Buttons was in too. He’s a kiss-up. Buttons thinks he’s Bruce Willis. Shaves his head, swaggers around, crinks his mouth to smile. Sometimes when Ooten is around, Buttons makes like Bruce Willis making like John Wayne, saying, Wal, pardner, let’s get ’er done. The effect: ridiculous.
    That day, Paul Ooten came out of his office a couple of times, said something to Buttons, something to me. I tried forcing my feelings, tried to look
at him the way I did before the night outside the motel with Erin. But I kept picturing him on her, her doing stuff to him.
    When Buttons left for lunch, Paul—it’s hard to call him Commander Ooten anymore—came into Room 5 where there are mail slots against the wall, a supply cabinet, a small refrigerator, the coffee machine. I was pouring coffee for myself. Ooten put a memo in a slot and then took some time to mention the weather, the Eagles game, and how he’d been thinking of taking a course in Excel. I couldn’t hide my lack of interest, but I guess because I had recently lost my mother to cancer, he said, “If you need to talk about it, Justin, my door’s always open.”
    I said something like Thanks, I’m fine. His manner, the kindness behind it, touched me. And I resolved to put what I saw at the motel out of my mind.
     
    What’s bitter is that Erin Flannery didn’t die from a car accident or a long-hidden disease. She died from brain trauma in her own home.
    Detectives interviewed the civilians in her life: family, friends, neighbors. They interviewed us at Troop M too, in due time. I wondered what Paul Ooten had told them. I wondered if the strained expression I saw each day was worry about his secret being outed, or if the tightness in his face was the shame he knew he brought to the badge. I’ll say this: for some guys, if they learned the commander was boning Erin he’d only be more of a hero in their eyes.
    No boyfriend turned up in the investigation. Bill Buttons said that’s sure hard to believe, a piece like that.
    A crime of opportunity, we concluded. It happens. Even to cops.
    Kleinsfeldt said he overheard there was something odd about the evidence in her case, he didn’t know what. We asked who he heard it from. He wouldn’t say.
    I reminded the guys that Flannery had been an LEO, a Liquor Enforcement Officer up in Harrisburg. It sounds like soft duty, but not necessarily. You go undercover to nab idiots who