I assumed, pressing my hands on the hot roof of the car.
“You’re under arrest,” he told me as he wound the cuffs around my wrists, pinning my arms behind me.
“What’s the charge?”
“Assaulting a police officer. Obstruction of justice.”
“Oh, for chrissake.”
“You think this is funny?”
“A little bit, yeah.”
“You won’t think it’s so funny when you’re locked in a cell.”
“Seriously, kid. How long have you been on the job?”
“Three weeks, if you must know.”
“And they let you out alone?”
“Three weeks since my probation period ended.”
Somehow I didn’t think his field-training officers had given him a lot of sevens.
“Let me guess,” I said. “You’re bored, right? You thought the job was going to be like Law & Order or CSI, or maybe even NYPD Blue, right? Yet all you do most days is sit on the shoulder of 169, shooting your radar gun at passing motorists, hoping you can find just cause to make someone blow into the PBT. Right? Only now you have something worth doing. You’re thinking, yeah, the guy in there, probably he’s just a medical—someone who woke up dead—unless maybe, just maybe, you caught yourself an honest-to-God homicide. Only real homicides aren’t like TV. They’re not neat like TV. You weren’t prepared for it. You blow chunks. That’s embarrassing enough, but you do it in front of the woman and me and now you’re pissed off. Well, welcome to the real world, kid, only stop behaving like a jerk. You don’t touch the suspect. You don’t violate her rights like that.”
The woman was still sitting on the grass, watching us. I don’t think she heard a word we said.
“She could confess to whacking the guy in there, to killing a hundred more, and most likely you won’t be able to touch her because you violated her rights.”
“Shuddup.”
“Look, kid, be smart. You can still fix this, you can still make it go away. Start by removing the cuffs. Think about it.”
He did. For about ten seconds. Then he said, “You’re going to jail.”
I tried to reason with him some more after he locked me in the back of his squad, but he wasn’t listening. Fine, I decided. I’ll talk to whoever takes command. That turned out to be a sergeant from the City of Anoka Police Department who looked too old for the job, thirty pounds over what the diet-hucksters consider his ideal weight, with hair that was more gray than brown. I watched him from the backseat as he moved about, directing his officers to secure the scene, something Baumbach had failed to do. We locked eyes a couple of times, but he never approached the car. I wished he would have. The engine—and thus the air conditioner—was off, and it was unbearably hot. I had to lean forward to avoid sticking to the seat. Sweat trickled from my brow into my eyes; the cuffs prevented me from wiping it away. Baumbach had left a small crack at the top of the driver’s side window, but it offered no relief. I felt like a small dog trapped in a locked vehicle in the parking lot of a shopping mall. It was all I could do to keep from panting.
The sergeant was soon supplanted by still another sergeant, this one in the uniform of the Anoka County Sheriff’s Department. I wasn’t surprised. Jurisdiction was always an iffy thing in a small community, and at about eighteen thousand people, Anoka was considered a small community. Its twenty-nine-man police department didn’t have the resources to investigate a possible homicide even if it wanted to and readily gave way to the county’s Criminal Investigation Division. Which didn’t help me any. I was locked in a City of Anoka police car, and when the Anoka County deputy made a gesture in my direction and the sergeant shook his head, I knew I wasn’t getting out anytime soon.
While the deputy directed his officers and a few plainclothes technicians, a couple of paramedics worked on the woman, checking her pulse, flashing a penlight in her eyes, asking her questions and receiving no answers. If they were curious about the swelling at the corner of her mouth, they kept it to themselves. Eventually, they loaded her in a car and drove away. I guessed that they were transporting her to the hospital, although it was a deputy that accompanied her, not a paramedic.
A few moments later, Baumbach returned to the squad and started it up. He switched on the air conditioner. It didn’t work quickly enough for him, and he stepped back outside, waiting patiently for the interior to cool before he drove off. I didn’t complain. What was the point? When he slid behind the wheel and put the car in gear I said, “Kinda odd that the deputy didn’t want to interview me, seeing how I was the one who discovered the body.”
“I told you. You’re going to jail.”
I swear to God that right up until they locked me in the holding cell, I thought he was bluffing.
