Part One
(This is part one of a longer fiction horror short story, Damned Echoes, following New Mexican State Police Officer, Isaiah Hendrix. This story will be updated with a new chapter every Thursday. Please enjoy! : )
The consistent drone of the fluorescent lights, worming its way deeper and deeper into my brain, the almost imperceptible and infrequent flicker of the light blinding as I adjusted the collar on my shirt again. I usually spend as long as I can getting “ready” for the day when I first get to work at 9. Precisely making the perfectly average office cup of coffee, taking as much time as I realistically could putting on another pot, making as much small talk as I could, letting any of my other coworkers stop and talk to me for however long they wanted or needed, usually until they had pulled me over for too long and I have to politely excuse myself to get to back to my desk before somebody notices how long I have been getting coffee. I set my coffee down on my desk next to an ample-sized stack of paperwork, a 2-inch tall bureaucratic nightmare, swamping me for the whole day. After looking at my computer, any fleeting energy I felt from my morning coffee was crushed instantly, when I saw, that despite all my efforts, it was still only 9:36 AM. I slowly start to shut my mind off as I start to slowly trudge through the paperwork. Mindlessly filling out form after form, silently musing to myself that America must exist and function solely to trade various papers from hand to hand. Being in the Special Investigations Unit of the New Mexico State Police sounds exciting and dramatic, but my job boils down to maybe a couple of hours in the field checking license compliances and investigating reports of gas stations in the middle of nowhere serving alcohol to minors and then the 20 hours of resulting paperwork. There is the brief odd assignment here and there that keeps me fresh, but for the most part, my work is mostly comprised of jobs too small for the ATF. Certainly not what I imagined I signed up to when I joined the Investigations Bureau. After an hour, sometime around 11, I was pondering what I was gonna get that day for lunch as I mindlessly wandered through my daily work, when I noticed one of my supervisors, Mike Smith, making his way to my desk from the corner of my eyes. Mike Smith was your typical cop climbing the ranks of the State Police, uniform short hair, a strong, but professional stature, and a grey-white mustache that would put the fear of a speeding ticket into any ordinary citizen. Mike Smith was a good man who had even joined us at the local bar for a night out on the odd occasion, as he wasn’t one of the big bosses that had you constantly on your toes, but he was nonetheless a professional and my direct superior, so out of instinct I straightened up a bit and tried to look like I was working harder than I actually was.
“Look alive, Isaiah.” He jokingly prodded at me as he dropped a manilla folder on my desk.
“I know you have been dying in the office recently and something came across my desk that I think you would be good for. “
“What is it?” I asked as I started to flip through the folder.
“Missing persons, a 5-year-old child went missing two weeks ago in Taos.”
My heart immediately sank. Some of the days where my job gets to me the most I think about my younger days as a police officer, when I spent less time at a desk. I didn’t love being a police officer, but as long as I was able to be out I was happy, the time I spent in the office was just the time in between field hours. But whenever I began to reminisce about my days as a cop too much, I would remember the bad days. The worst days of them almost always missing children. Working on a missing children case could be one of the most soul-crushing assignments of your career. More often than not a missing child is a child who ran away and will show up in a day or two or a teenager who partied too hard and too long and went missing for too long, and unknowingly came home to a police investigation. But those aren’t the cases I remember, the true cases where children have been abducted or just seemingly vanished into thin air, with usually very little evidence and with excruciatingly little I could do, only hanging on by a thread, only kept on the edge of a cliff by a small blind sliver of hope and refusal to give up on the life of an innocent child that could be hanging on by a thread, every second the potential between life and death. After some time has passed and with the child still missing it will have become a tragic but an almost certainty that the child will not be found, or at least not alive. While the higher-up detectives worked on the finer details of the case, my only role from there was to be a lightning rod for all the rage, pain, fury, fear, despair, and whatever terrible ugliness understandably surfaced by the stress brought on to the parents of a young child. Ugliness I had to face with a calm and understanding demeanor as I could only imagine the avalanche of fear these parents were struck with, but that kind of fear can cause any person to do irrational things.
I blurted out, “But that’s a case for missing persons? And if it has already been two weeks, then what is the point in me going out to Taos, the kid is probably not going to be found alive at this point.” I hate myself for saying that, and I hated myself even more for believing it.
“We already have had two men out there for well over a week now. Officers Dexter Mendoza and Caleb Welsh from missing persons. I’m sure you’re familiar, right?”
“Yes, I have met them a couple of times and seen them around the office. Friendly enough.”
“Well, they have been investigating over there since the eleventh, and they and the local sheriff have only been able to get a couple of leads on a missing 5-year-old Danny Miller. Just vanishes from a small neighborhood park when the mother turns her back, no clues, no witnesses, no concrete leads. Most likely the mother had her head turned a little longer than she would like to admit and the kid wandered into the nearby wilderness left in nature’s hand. Police along with search and rescue did a thorough sweep of the surrounding area but turned up with only a single piece of his t-shirt. You are most likely right, about the boy…” Mike delivered, slowing down towards the end pausing for a brief moment to look down at the ground. He continued,
“But that’s not why they want somebody out there. One of the deputies investigating the case has also turned up missing yesterday. They found his squad car in an abandoned lot with everything still in it, including his firearms. There are no notes, signs of struggle, or any sign of anything wrong except for the simple fact that this man has also vanished. The mysterious vanishment and the fact that he was also investigating the boy’s disappearance is the connection so far, though. And seeing how they are now short a man and need some extra help, we are sending Special Investigations, you. We already have two guys out there from the Missing Persons Unit and we can’t really afford to send a lot of guys for a missing deputy.”
“I don’t know… How long am I going to be out there?” I stammered.
“Isaiah, you shouldn’t have to be out there more than 2 weeks. This is an easy one. It’s a boy missing in the desert and a deputy playing hooky. Look, I know how you want to get better assignments here and don’t love the workload of Special Investigations, but you get out there and wrap up this case easy, nice, and tight, I promise you we will get you better assignments,” Mike assured me.
“I’ll do it then.”
“Great, finish up your work here and then head out there first thing tomorrow morning to Taos and meet the Sheriff and our boys at the Taos Cafe on Kit Carson Rd. They will catch you up to speed and show you your lodging. Good luck up there and take it easy, alright?” He told me as he patted me on the shoulder, turning around to walk back to his office.
I decided to skip lunch and hurry with my work, as the rest of my day flew by with this new assignment consuming my thoughts. As I was driving home I wasn’t sure how to feel. I felt good about getting out of the office and stretching my legs on an interesting field assignment. But as the lights on the highway started to become a dotted blur on the edges of my peripheral, a sinking, uneasy feeling started to slowly creep in. The thought of working on a missing child did not sit well with me. The unsettling lack of any real evidence or leads didn’t help either. I had a feeling that this case was not gonna be as easy as Mike tells me it is. I turned up the radio as James Brown’s It’s a Man’s Man’s World started to play and try and quell my racing thoughts. It’s my job, I reassured myself.
October 21st, 2012
I’m excited about going to Taos. The surrounding landscape is gorgeous. It’s part of the reason why I fell in love with New Mexico. I told the wife, I don’t know how Delilah felt. She seemed annoyed at first, but I think she gets it and will be a little relieved to get some free time to herself. There has been some tension in the air recently. I think both of us are just starting to hit the age where we are both just tired, but still have a lot more to go. But things aren’t that bad and I will have to make this up to her when I get back. If I get back. I’m not serious, but a missing deputy on top of a missing child does put the smallest of lumps in my throat. Just enough so I can’t sit comfortably. I will be fine, though. I didn’t survive this long to get eaten by some desert coyote.
