We Didn't Start The Fire

Going into the station today felt weird, it felt wrong. James didn’t have his usual smile at the front desk, Detective Strode didn’t run up to me the second I walked through the door blabbering on about a juicy new case she got, it even rained on the bus ride down Eighth Avenue, Which is always somehow sunny. In the absence of Strode’s morning chat, I noticed Captain Kelley outside the door of his office looking smug which is pretty normal, the difference was usually he’d be the only one like that. 

“What’ve you got for me?” I said with a less-than-happy tone while approaching him

“Good Morning Detective Mortimer, why don’t you come sit with me in my office for a moment.” He replied while opening the navy blue door. I followed him while my mind wandered about why he wanted to see me so formally, but it didn’t get far once I quickly realized the obvious. 

“I’m sure you’ve heard about what happened here,” He said while fitting himself into his chair.

“Uh, yes, I did” I replied

“I wanted to speak with you alone briefly because you were, fortunately, the only one who doesn't have a case affected by the evidence that was stolen last night.” 

“Okay, thank you for informing me Captian, do you have any details about what happened?” I said as a weight lifted off of my shoulders.

“Well,” he started while letting out a sigh, “it seems the person or people who did this took about 16 things. All random, so it’s going to be pretty hard to nail down if this is related to a case, and from initial evaluations, it seems that the Gacey Street Robbery, The McKay drug bust, and the…” he paused, “Jefferson homicide have been hit the hardest.” 

“Jesus,” I replied.

“It’ll be hard to recuperate the loss so just go easy on the team for a while, they’ll be all under a lot of stress.” 

“Of course, Captian.”

“In the meantime,” he said while getting out of his chair and walking towards his filing cabinet, “I’ve got this Arson case for you.” He handed me the case file. 

“Suspect is 19-year-old Ashley Armstrong, he was found right outside of a burning barn in the woods out in Orland Park. There was a bong with the fingerprints of three individuals on it and a lighter found in the barn, we’ve also got an eyewitness who saw the fire and two people driving away from it. The suspect was taken into custody at 1:23 AM this morning. It’s also worth mentioning they found blood on the barn floor but it’s from approximately one month ago and didn’t match the suspect so it may be nothing. He is waiting for you now in interrogation room 2B.” He said with a forced cheer in his voice while handing me the file.

I left The Captain’s office and started down the hall toward the interrogation room. I took a glance through this Ashley guy’s file and noticed he hasn’t had any past convictions, and currently attends The University Of Chicago.

“Yea this is definitely just some kid who wanted to smoke some pot and didn’t know what he was doing,” I thought to myself as I approached the door and walked in. 

“Hello Mr. Armstrong, I am Detective Holly Mortimer. How are you this morning?” I looked at him for a moment while closing the door behind me and noticed his raggedy clothes and box-dyed bleach-blond medium length hair that looked especially brassy compared to his pale face.

“Tired,” he said slouched in the metal chair. 

“You’re facing a pretty serious charge of arson here, are you aware of that?”

“Yup,” he said with an annoyed tone which I’ve come to know and love from perps over the years.

“Did you do it?” I asked bluntly

“No, I didn’t”

“Okay well, why don’t you tell me what you believe happened and then I’ll tell you what I think happened, okay?” I said with the same tone he was using with me.

“Okay well I was going for a walk around the area and I thought I smelled smoke but I didn’t really care so I just kept going on my walk. But on my way back I actually saw a glow out in the woods where the old barn is, so I went into the woods and was looking around for whoever or whatever caused this huge blaze. Once I got close enough to see actually how bad it actually was, I noticed someone out of the corner of my eye on the left of the barn and-”

“Hold on, hold on- you saw somebody?” I said interrupting 

“Yes, are you deaf?” 

“You never mentioned that anyone else was on the property in your original statement to the officer you talked to when you first got to the station.” He was silent for a moment. 

“Oh right, it was a bear I think, anyways -” 

“Okay, I’m going to stop you right there,” I said, interrupting his story that already had holes in it barely a sentence in, 

“Mr. Armstrong, you’re a student with a clean record who wanted to get a little bit wild and smoke some pot out in an abandoned barn and accidentally burnt it down, maybe you got a little too high, maybe you dropped the lighter, who cares, all I know is that you caused some damage and we’ve got a bong found on the scene with you and two other people’s fingerprints on it and an eyewitness stating they saw two people in a car coming from Orland Park and you on the scene. Now this can go through a long court process and end up with you and your friends in a lot of trouble or you can tell me what actually happened and if the people you were with can confirm your statement, we can save a lot of time here, how does that sound?” 

“Fine!, we were smoking okay, damn, but the barn caught on fire after they left,” he said rolling his eyes.

“Who’s we” 

“Me, Maria Charter, and Erin Webber,” he uttered along with a sigh.

“You made the right choice Mr. Armstrong,” I said while leaving the Interrogation room.

I went over to Maria Charter’s house first who was utterly terrified of me but after some calming down at her doorstep, she eventually let me in.

“Hello, Ms. Charter I was wondering if I could ask you some questions about your whereabouts last night,”

The questions made her panic inside but I could tell she tried to keep a calm composure.

“I was here at my apartment all night detective”

“Ashley Armstrong seems to think otherwise” 

“Goddammit! I knew he’d rat us out!” she exclaimed, “Okay, well I guess you’re here to arrest me then right?” 

“Well, no. I agree you shouldn’t be smoking pot in a state where it’s illegal, but I’m actually here to ask if you were involved with the fire that burnt down the barn.” 

“Oh my god, no, of course not! I had no idea there even was one,” she said with concern that seemed very genuine to me.

“Okay well, you’ll need to go down to the station to give your statement.

“Okay.” She replied.

My conversation with the other boy, Erin Webber, went almost exactly the same and he just confirmed what seemed obvious from the very beginning. Maria and Erin’s statements were enough for the DA to charge Ashley Armstrong with arson, and just like that another case that seemed to be open and shut. 

The rest of the day I was out looking for leads on last night’s evidence theft, but to me, it seemed like there was nothing. The break-in tactics didn’t seem to match anything that recent, the evidence that was stolen was taken completely random so there’s no way to tell if it was linked to any specific case, we were all at dead ends, unfortunately. Just as I was starting to feel down in the dumps, detective Strode called me with an update.

“Hello?” I said to my car’s hands-free microphone that never seems to work right.

“Hey Mortimer, it’s Strode, how’s it going out there, any leads?” She asked.

“No, not really,” I replied, “How’s it going at the station?” 

“Nothing quite yet, this case is gonna be a tough one that’s for sure,” she said with a sigh.

“Yup,” I said with a similar sigh.

“Good news is that it looks like that arson case of yours is open and shut, that kids looking at probably 2 years if he’s lucky”

“Yup, stupid kid, gotta learn somehow” 

“Okay well I’ll let you get back to it-, oh yea, Captain wants you to go take down the scene at the barn, we can’t have all the caution tape blowing around the woods” 

“Ugh fine, I’ll see you around”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

I didn’t really mind having to go clean up that old barn considering I’m not really doing anything anyway, and I can use that as an excuse to just mess around for the last hour of my shift.

Once I got to the barn I really started to notice how much that fire did to it, it was almost completely burnt down except for the remanence of a room in the back corner, I quickly bunched up the caution tape and threw it in the back of my car, then did one quick walkthrough of the scene. The area that was untouched by the flame had a nook-type-thing with a bunch of papers in it. I went searching through and at the bottom of it there was a small paper with writing on it that stood out from the rest of the document-looking papers inside, it had been crumpled a few times and had the words “Magic Sparkle - 10 - 100$” and “McKay” on it. The word McKay seemed to jog something in my memory but I couldn’t quite remember what it meant so I decided to call Strode and see if she knew.

“Hi, does the word McKay mean anything to you?” I said as soon as she picked up the phone.

“Uh, yes, Peter McKay is the name of that drug dealer we caught a while ago, there was also a bunch of evidence from that case stolen last night, why?” she replied 

“What exactly was stolen?”

“Uhhh,” she said while shuffling some papers, “multiple recipes from his deals”

“Holy Shit,” I said as I could feel the pieces coming together in my brain

“What?” Strode said

“Read me a list of everything that was stolen” 

“um, okay, There was the receipts from the McKay case, a couple of jackets from the Dilertis case, the pen that the perp used to kill Daniel Jefferson in the Jefferson Homicide, the notes from the LeBelle case, a USB stick with CCTV footage of the Gacey street robbery… do you want me to keep going?” Strode said as I was scavenging what was left of the barn. 

While I was frantically running around the barn like a lunatic I found a half-melted pen cemented to the ground, after even more looking I found a USB stick under some hay in a corner.

“Mortimer? Are you there?” She yelled into the phone

“Strode, some of the stolen evidence is in this barn, you have to keep Ashley Armstrong at the station he cannot go to court yet,” I told her

“Oh my god,” she said before she yelled out, “Someone Get Ashley Armstrong from the transport truck before they leave, hurry!” we both paused in disbelief “This doesn't make any sense to me, why would he bring so much attention to himself? Why wouldn’t he just burn the evidence in a trashcan or something?” Strode asked me.

“Because,” I paused, “this barn is evidence too,” I said while looking at the blood stain on the wooden floor, “and he didn’t do it”.

“What?” Strode said. “Then who did?”

“Maria Charter and Erin Webber, get them to the station, I’m on my way”.

I drove as fast as I could back to the station, I had so many questions and I knew I wouldn’t be able to crack this case with him behind bars. I busted through the station door and ran right to where Strode had Mr. Armstrong sitting.

“Mr. Armstrong I just found four damning articles of evidence that was stolen from this police station last night in the barn that you were just charged with burning down. I need you to tell me what happened last night or you will end up being charged with a lot more than arson, but I’m not totally convinced you did all these things so you can save yourself now but this is the only chance you’ll get.” 

His eyes began to swell. “I can't,” he said.

“Ashley. Please. Maria and Erin have already been apprehended and they are going to be here soon. It’s over. Tell me what you all did” 

He burst out in a full-on cry. “It all started a month ago when Maria invited professor Jefferson to the barn where we would hang out almost every weekend, Jefferson got really drunk and started trying to undress Maria, I don't even know why she would invite him, she was just trying to act like shes this crazy mature adult but she’s really not. Maria started to get extremely angry and then grabbed this pen from his bag and stabbed him all over, I was in shock. The second she knew he was dead she started rambling on to me and Erin about how if we say anything we’d be accessories to his murder. So we helped her clean up everything, we dumped his body in the lake and threw the pen in there too. But after that things just got even worse, she started to become addicted to the thrill of crime. We robbed the bank on Gacey street, started dealing for McKay, but last night, things hit an all-time high. Maria got this crazy idea that you guys were building a case against us, so she made us break in and steal everything you had on us and more, and then brought it all to the barn and burned it. But the most insane part of it all, I didn’t even start the fire! She and Erin did! We went to the barn after we got everything and she told me to wait outside to keep watch and then lit up the place and told me on the way out that I have to take the fall for the fire and come up with some stupid story about smoking and something going wrong. She planted the bong and everything, she had the whole thing planned out. She said that this way, all of our mistakes together would go away in one fell swoop and after a couple of years in prison, I’d be out and it would be all over. But I don’t care anymore, I’ll do my time. This needs to end.” 

His whole story made sense, I couldn’t believe it, all these cases were wrapped up together and we didn’t even notice.

“Now this is juicy,” Strode said from behind me.