INSPECTOR PASCAL MYSTERIES 1000
#19 Best Suited, by T.K. Naliaka ©2016-2023

Sgt. Braque had to break into a trot to catch up, “Sir! What happened?”

He stopped.  A long moment passed before he finally replied. “I was informed that I take too many risks. Therefore, my performance evaluation was rated only Satisfactory.  If I don’t start conforming better, it’ll be revised to Probationary status.”

Braque gasped. “No!”

He glanced at his watch. “I’m sorry, I have an appointment.  I can’t be late.”

Braque watched disbelieving as he went to his car, got in and drove off.  Frustrated, Braque finally called after him. “I know you don’t have an appointment!  I manage all of your scheduling!”

The next morning, he was subdued as Braque followed him up three floors and along a corridor of offices.  He stopped, knocked, then opened a door.  “I am reporting to Inspector Fortuna.”

“You are?”

“Inspector Pascal.”

“Ah yes! You’re the reckless one.  Need a bit of supervision, so I’ve been told.”

Pascal colored slightly.  Braque’s eyes narrowed.

Fortuna lifted a large, heavy binder. “I have just the job for you.”

Pascal took it, “Sir?”

Fortuna told him. “You go to the police records warehouse depository and locate the original files on this case so we can have them digitized to make cross-referencing them easier.”

Braque blurted, “Sir! That’s a clerical job!”

Fortuna squinted at him, “Sergeant.”

“Sir.”

“Would you prefer patrol duty?”

Braque wanted to reply, yes I would, but he restrained himself, “No sir.”

Two hours later, Pascal stood dejectedly as he surveyed acres of crowded shelving, cartons, boxes and files.  He finally sighed. “Let’s see what Fortuna wants.”  They found a small folding table, two metal folding chairs, set them in a small space they cleared and sat down.  Pascal opened the binder, “Case number 0023-897-1000435.”

Braque grumbled. “That’s clear as mud.”

Pascal became still, then his hazel eyes widened.

Braque asked. “What is it?”

Pascal straightened as he leafed through.  He looked up with excitement. “This is the biggest unsolved murder in the entire department!”

“What!”

Pascal exclaimed, “The Depository murder!” He jumped up and swept out his arms, “Thirteen years ago - right here!”

A half hour later, they paced slowly along a narrow aisle. Pascal referred to the binder as they went, “Stop.  No, keep going… another meter.”

Braque stepped aside and pointed. “The police officer’s body was found here?”

“Yes.”

“Had it been moved?”

“No, killed where he stood.”

Braque indicated with his chin. “Officer Dawson was shot from behind from a distance of fourteen feet.  His murderer was standing there.”

Pascal considered the packed shelves. “We can keep ourselves busy.  Let’s suppose the victim was doing something right here that was a threat to the killer.  The only firm assertion was that the murderer was - perhaps still is - employed in some manner at the police department – with access to this building.  They interviewed hundreds of staff without generating any leads.” Pascal shrugged. “So let’s just take a look at what’s archived here and see if we find anything.”

“These are vehicular reports for the twenty years prior to the murder.” Braque grimaced, “Twenty years!”

“Hold this.” Pascal passed Braque the opened binder.  Pascal pulled out a piece of chalk from his pocket and copied the original outline of the body as it had been found, plus two lines. “Officer Dawson fell exactly here, so let’s make these our margins.  We have all week; we’ll systematically check every single document inside this boundary, starting with the section he was in front of when he was shot.”

Three days later, Braque looked up, alarmed. “I think I found something!”

Pascal glanced over. “Tell me.”

“A hit and run fatality… twenty-eight years ago; Charlene Tandy, married to Todd Tandy.”

“And?”

Braque whispered. “He’s Lieutenant Tandy now!”

Pascal quickly paged to the master list of interviews, found Tandy’s name and read the summary notes. “He was attending a three-day conference at the time of this murder.”

“He could have slipped out of it!”

“Perhaps!”

Pascal straightened warily. “Sergeant…do you smell anything?”

Braque stood up quickly. They grabbed the binder, the file and ran to the closest exit as the smoke alarm blared.  Pascal pushed the exit doors, but they hardly budged. “They’ve been chained!”

As they turned to head for a different exit, they heard the links clattering and the doors were thrown open.

They stepped out to discover Inspector Fortuna and his men. Pascal exclaimed. “How is it you’re here?”

“We’ve been watching the building since you started.  We just foiled an arson attempt.  Unfortunately, the perpetrator escaped.”

“You didn’t send us here to retrieve files! We’ve been here as live bait?”

“You have an interesting reputation, so I thought I’d test it.  The culprit was inside the police department.  After reviewing the personnel evaluations I decided that you both were the best suited for the job.  Pascal, you started somewhat recently so you were clean for my purposes and a potential real threat to the murderer - provided he or she was still in the department.  Braque, you joined just after the murder and worked up the ranks; you know almost everybody.  I passed the word that you two were working on a new lead on the case.”

“You could have told us!”

Fortuna chuckled. “Pascal, you had that egregious performance evaluation sticking in your craw.  You couldn’t be assigned this case, but what if it was unexpectedly in your hands?  Might you actually discover something everyone else missed?”  Fortuna peered at them. “Wait… you really did?!”

Braque replied. “Decades ago, before he became a police officer, Lieutenant Tandy was married to a woman who was killed in an unsolved hit-and-run accident.”

Pascal added. “Possibly Officer Dawson found out, suspected it hadn’t been accidental and was murdered while trying to locate the record.  Officer Dawson died within two meters of the original vehicular report.”

Fortuna smiled as he took the incriminating document, “Outstanding!  While we press the pursuit of our mysterious arsonist, let’s confirm the whereabouts of Lieutenant Tandy.”
​ by T.K. Naliaka ©2016-2023, all rights reserved

INSPECTOR PASCAL MYSTERIES 1000
#18 Questions by T.K. Naliaka ©2016-2023

 The whisper was by his ear. “What tipped you off that he was the bad guy?”

He turned his head to look at the boy, earnestly leaning close with wide and curious eyes.  He squinted, then he replied. “The first clue was: he said he couldn’t walk very well.”

The boy climbed up on the chair, propped his elbows, then his chin on his hands. “Why was that important?”

“The killer had to have made a quite long jump in order to get away, you see?”

The boy nodded, then he shook his head. “No.”

“Ah, well.  He wanted to fool us, yes?”

The boy nodded firmly.

“So he killed the poor fellow in a difficult place to walk and climb.  Thus, when everyone came to investigate, no one believed it could be him, because he was with leg braces and a crutch.  But he was pretending.”

“Really?”

“Yes.  He was clever at it, over a year of fooling people into thinking he couldn’t walk well, so no one considered him to be physically able to do what the killer did – carry the body and deposit it in a hard-to-reach place.  You understand, when we go to investigate any crime, we don’t know anyone.  We don’t know their names or their histories or what kind of people they are.  We have to get to know them very quickly.  We don’t who is lying or who is telling the truth.  We have to ask questions of everyone.”

The boy nodded, “OK.”

“So how were we to know that he could walk perfectly well?  Everyone who knew him said he’d had an accident the year before.  This means that he thought about it a long time ago, how to fool the police.  All of them had witnessed him being crippled for a year.  The people he worked with believed it completely.  So, he was a very dangerous man – he planned and pretended for an entire year to kill his business partner.”

The boy’s eyes were wide, “Wow. That’s wrong!”

“Yes, it is very terrible.”

“But, why?”

“That’s the other thing we never know -  what we have to figure out – what reason did the killer have in his head to kill this person?  It’s very evil, so sometimes it’s very hard for nice people to understand this.”

“Did you find out?”

“Yes.  That sometimes is quite boring.  It means sitting in chairs, reading a lot of files.  The files we were interested in were about money – so we had to understand the numbers, the addition, the subtraction, the multiplication, the division. You know these?”

He nodded. “Yes!  My dad makes me practice every day!”

“Very good.  After that, you also learn about the numbers.”

“What is that?”

“Well, for example: You have two dogs.”

“I have three.”

“OK, three dogs.  How much food do you feed them… how many bags of dog food every month?”

He frowned, “Um…two big bags.”

“All right, let’s say each bag is $20. How much money is two bags?”

“$40!”

“Good!  If someone said they spent $300 on dog food for their three dogs, what do you think of that amount of money, based on what you know about your dogs and dog food?”

He gasped. “That’s too much money!”

“Exactly.  It might be true if he buys a very fancy food, but it might not be true.  Because we know what the usual amount is, a number like that catches our attention. Therefore, we must have an idea as to what is usual so we can quickly see when numbers don’t seem to fit.  Many times we find that someone claims $300 but they only actually spent $50.  They kept the money or they were trying to hide the real use of the money.  Perhaps they spent it on buying things for themselves, but claimed it was all dog food.”

“Oh!”

“So, we looked at the numbers of the money.  Simply, the payments and the receiving of money didn’t match the bank account numbers.  The murderer was using up the money of the company.  The murderer planned to take over the company – steal from his partner.  His partner of course would never agree to that, so he got rid of the partner, who also knew a lot of information that the murderer didn’t want other people to know.  He figured he could kill his partner in a way that people didn’t know that he did it, then he would be the full owner of the company.”

“That’s mean!”

“Yes, it really is.”

“You said there was a clue.”

He nodded. “When you don’t use muscles, they get a bit smooth-looking and thinner.  I noticed that his leg muscles were as strongly-formed as a footballer’s muscles.  This would not be true after a year in leg braces and crutches.”

The boy sat down and stretched out his own legs. “Oh!”

“Well, so it was an easy thing to set up a little trick – to see if he was stronger than he was claiming.”

They both looked over as the door was opened by a large, broad-shouldered man.  He called. “I found him!”  He frowned. “Has he been bothering you?”

“Not at all; he’s been very good company.”

The boy smiled, nodded then looked at his father.  His father held his hand out.  The boy stood up, “Thank you sir.  I hope you get better real soon."

“I will… thank you.”

The boy went out.  His father carefully closed the door, “Sir.”

“Yes, Sergeant?”

“I want to thank you for…  I just wasn’t able to see that he had a gun.  You took the bullet meant for me.”

Drowsy, he sighed and rolled his head on the hospital pillow to consider him gravely. “I just had a very special ten minutes being completely reassured that it was absolutely the right thing to do.  It would have been awful having to answer your son’s questions at your funeral.  I’ve been greatly enjoying telling him everything he wants to know.”

​by T.K. Naliaka ©2016 All rights reserved