Chapter 14: Ancient Greece
1168 Words
The police officer looked at the shirt that she handed him. A second later grabbed the microphone to his radio and was on the line to police headquarters. He moved away do they couldn’t hear what he had to say, but Jason could tell Candy had found something important to the case.
Jason remembered to bring her shoes along and handed them to Candy when the officer walked away. She starred at them for a few seconds and looked to Jason.
“Do I have to?” she asked.
“Yes, Candy,” Jason told her, “I can’t have you walking around here barefoot. People will think you don’t have any manners.”
Candy sighed, took the shoes and slipped them on her feet. “At least these don’t hurt me so much,” she told him.
“This matches the size and description of the one he wore when his parents last saw him,” the officer said to them. He walked quickly over to his cruiser and returned with an evidence bag. As they watched, the officer placed the shoe in the plastic bag and sealed it. He then signed it with a black pen and dated it.
“I guess you have to do that to everything you find,” Jason observed.
“Pretty much,” he responded. “Did you know in ancient Greece they had the same problem of valid evidence we have today?”
“No, never heard about it,” Jason replied as he turned to watch Candy stare at something on the ground. Her little sprint to the park bothered him, even if she did find something useful. He needed to talk to her about it again.
“It’s true. They didn’t have cops so the accused party was allowed to search a house for evidence himself. You know how they stopped evidence from being planted?” The cop waited until Jason turned in his direction.
“I’ll never guess.”
“The person who searched for evidence had to do it naked.” He snickered.
“You learn something every day,” Jason replied. He turned back to Candy. She was squatted down to the ground and starred at something.
“So every time I see that evidence unit pull up,” the cop concluded. “I image them walking into the house naked. They still don’t know why I laugh every time.” The cop found this hilarious and Jason pretended he found it amusing too.
Sometimes it doesn’t pay to be the killjoy, he thought to himself.
“Did you check the park after the kid came up missing?” Jason asked the cop, as he tried to change the subject.
“Several times. I’m surprised this never turned up. Guess no one thought about climbing a tree. Say, that gives me an idea, why can’t you have her do it again?”
Candy turned to Jason. She gave him a “told-you-so” look as she pulled off her shoes a second time. Minutes later, she was climbing through the trees in the park and looking for anything that appeared out of the ordinary.
Although she spent another hour climbing around and jumping to the ground, Candy failed to find anything else of value. The cop decided it was time to return to the police headquarters after they’d been up there for a good hour and all of them returned to the car.
“She’s pretty at good at climbing those trees,” the cop told Jason. “Notice how many of them don’t have limbs close to the ground. It’s to keep the kids off the trees.”
“I noticed the ‘No Tree Climbing’ signs,” Jason spoke to him as they headed back to police headquarters.”
“Sometimes you have to bend the rules a bit to get what you need for a conviction,” the cop spoke. “The signs are up there because some kid fell out of one of the trees years ago and the city doesn’t want to get sued a second time.”
The check-in with police station was quick once the officer turned in the shirt. An evidence technician rushed it to the lab. They were told it would take a few hours to see if it matched the description of the one on the missing child. In the meantime, they were free to return to the motel. The next task force meeting wouldn’t be until tomorrow.
“Is there a place where we can visit the newspaper morgue?” Jason asked the chief as they were about to leave?”
“The what?”
“Where they keep the old back-issues of the local newspaper. Some places used to bind copies until they were transferred to microfilm. Usually the local newspaper has them, but a lot of those closed down. I’m think they public library might have one.”
“Of course. They open up at nine in the morning. You should have plenty of time to go there before the next meeting. I have your card. We’ll call you the moment there’s a match on the shirt or any news breaks.” He handed his card to Jason who pocketed it.
Jason thanked him and left police headquarters with Candy.
By the time the van pulled out of the parking lot, most of the media was gone. Word spread quickly about the discovery of the shoe, but not how it came about. The officer in charge of the lot directed them out by a back way were they would be less likely to be noticed.
“How did you know where to look for that shirt?” Jason asked her as they headed down the road.
“I just did,” she responded. This disappointed Jason, as he really wanted to know how she found it.
“I’d like to know what made you think to look in the park,” he asked her. “Do you realize that you did something the entire police department couldn’t do?”
Candy looked away from him and out the window. “I saw the park and knew it was where I’d want to go if left that yard,” she told him. “It wasn’t hard to climb over the fence and I went there. I was lucky when I climbed the tree and found the shirt. You said it was a little boy’s shirt?”
“Yes I did,” Jason replied. “At least that is what the police told us.”
“I hope I he gets his shirt back,” she spoke and continued to stare out the window.
- Writer
