On Monday morning, Jake Tillman glanced at his watch and decided he had just enough time to stop for a decent coffee on the way to the office. He knew it would be the only one of the day—the coffee at the district attorney’s office was always cold, but still somehow managed to taste burned.
The day was already in full swing at the coffee shop in downtown New Falls. A group of men in their sixties, all fit if a bit paunchy in their matching spandex biking gear, clomped around in cycling shoes, taking their coffees outside for a postride chat. Inside there were half a dozen people in line, mostly moms in yoga pants with expensive strollers, sure to order complicated latte creations that would hold up the line. Nobody, aside from Jake, looked like they were on their way to work. How did people do it around here?
Coffee finally in hand, Jake swung his briefcase over his shoulder and walked the two blocks to the Hart County Courthouse, which housed the prosecutor’s offices. In a town of brick rowhouses and window flower boxes, the courthouse, with soaring concrete arches and a wall of glass, struck an odd contrast. But what was fresh in the sixties was fading now, and Jake always felt that the fluorescent lights and linoleum floor made his position as an assistant district attorney in a small, wealthy town seem dreary rather than dashing. During his days at law school down at Temple University, he’d imagined himself in an office with parquet floors and brass fixtures. Maybe even a bar cart. The reality of public service had turned out to be a little different.
After passing through the metal detectors in the lobby, Jake took the elevator to the second floor. He slid his key into the door, but the handle moved freely beneath his hand. Someone had beaten him in.
“Is that you, Jake?” called a raspy voice. Donna, assistant to the head district attorney, Hal Buckley, was sitting at her desk outside of Hal’s closed office door.
Jake looked at his watch. “Don’t tell me Hal’s here this early.”
Donna glanced at the planner on her desk. “Hal has meetings off-site this morning. He won’t be in until after lunch.”
“Sounds like tennis and lunch at the club to me.”
Donna smiled. “It’s good to be the boss.”
“It certainly is.”
Donna glanced at the paper under Jake’s arm. “You’re not going to need that. The news came to you this morning. Jimmy’s waiting for you in your office.”
Jake perked up. “Something interesting?”
“I’ll let him tell you. He’s practically salivating.”
Jake went down the hall to his office, where every surface was covered in three-ring binders and case files filled with the usual small-town problems: drunk driving, petty theft, domestics. Detective
Jimmy Murray was sprawled on a chair in the middle of the mess. “Counselor,” he said, nodding.
“Detective. To what do I owe the pleasure of your company? If you’ve got another DUI for me, you can add it to the pile.” He flicked his thumb at the stacks of documents.
“Oh, I got a few of those, and some drunk and disorderlies for you too; the usual Monday morning assortment. But that’s not why I’m here. You won’t believe this shit.” He tossed a slim folder onto Jake’s desk, but he launched into the story before Jake could open the file.
“So, Friday night, I get a call about a bunch of kids down by the river making a ruckus. Typical end of-the-school-year stuff—we break up parties down there every spring. I head down to River Road, throw on the sirens to smoke ’em out, and sure enough, a few kids start coming out of the woods, running for their cars.”
“High school students. What a collar.” Jake smirked.
“Hold on, hold on. So, we round up half a dozen kids—some of them were pretty wasted—and we start collecting ID’s. A couple of them I already know; a few have Jersey licenses. One dumbass was actually still holding a beer, so he gets an underage-drinking ticket, and we start calling parents. But basically it goes down like usual: the parents show up, we give a little lecture, and everyone goes home. Typical Friday night.”
“And?”
“And I go home and crawl into bed with my wife, take the kids to Soccer Tots in the morning, and I don’t think about it again all weekend. Until six this morning. That’s when we get a call from a contractor working on that new house going up by the river. You seen it? It’s the all-glass one, looks like a spaceship. Anyway, the contractor goes over to open up the house for the painters, and finds the place completely trashed. He calls it in as vandalism, and Officer Cruz and I go down to check it out. Guess where it is? Less than a quarter mile from where we found those kids on Friday night.”
Murray took out a digital camera, and Jake leaned in to look as he pulled up photos on the grainy screen. The first one showed a kitchen, or what was left of it. The doors were torn off the cabinets, the fixtures were gone, and the walls had been punched through and tagged with looping swirls of spray paint. The next picture showed a wooden deck with a charred hole in the center. Murray scrolled through pictures of broken windows, pools of water, and cigarette burns in the floor. The last picture showed a toilet, broken in half and lying on its side on the deck.
“It looks like they have plumbing issues,” Jake said, taking the camera to look closer. “Among other things.”
Murray winced. “We completely fucking missed it. By the time the contractor got there, the whole place was flooded from the faucets running all weekend. We counted a dozen broken glass doors, walls all punched in, and piss everywhere. I’ve seen squats down in the city that looked better. The chief is pleased as hell, of course.”
Jake was still scrolling through the photos. “They really did a number on this place. And you’re sure it was kids? Where are the owners?”
“They haven’t moved in yet. The contractor is calling them. I’m sure I’ll be hearing from them shortly.”
“You really think kids did this?” Jake asked again. “It’s pretty extreme.”
“I’m not ruling anything out, but the whole place stunk like beer. They tore a mirror off the wall; looked like cocaine residue all over it. We’ll send it to the lab. If adults around here are throwing this kind of party, we’ve got bigger problems than just this house. But it was most likely high school students. They must have gotten all jacked up and lost their fucking minds. Anyway, I’m on the hook for missing it on Friday night. Chief said I had to bring it down to you, make sure we do it all by the book, since we’re dealing with teenagers here. Everyone I sent home on Friday night was eighteen or under. And these aren’t punks. These are rich kids, or most of them are, anyway. When the parents realize that there are going to be charges, they’ll lawyer up.”
Jake glanced down at the picture of the wrecked kitchen. “What kind of kid would do this?”
Murray laughed. “I’m sure you got into your share of trouble when you were that age.”
Jake shook his head, thinking of his own teenage years in a working-class part of Philly: Catholic school, a part-time job after class instead of sports, and always the vague suspicion that somewhere else people were probably having more fun than he was. “Not too much,” he said. “Maybe a little drinking in parking lots and basements, that sort of thing. This seems different. But maybe I’m just getting old.” He shook his head. “So, what’s the plan?”
“First I’ll check back in with officers who are still on-site, see what they turned up at the house. Then I’m gonna follow up with the kids we caught on Friday. Get the real story and see who else was there.”
Jake opened the file folder Murray had given him and flipped through until he came to photocopies of the tickets that Murray had given out on Friday night, scanning the names to see if any of them were part of the regular rotation. “William O’Connor. We know him?”
“You’re thinking of his brother, Sean O’Connor III, goes by the name Trip. He’s been through here for possession and a few other things. He was on the road too, actually. But he’s twenty-one, so I just sent him home.”
“And William?”
“Never seen him before.”
“Following in his brother’s footsteps,” Jake said. “Let’s start there. Pull Trip O’Connor’s record. We can probably put some pressure on him, if he’s looking at distribution to minors. He won’t want to take the fall for this if half the high school was there.”
“With any luck, I’ll have this all wrapped up by the end of the week, and the chief will forget I ever missed it.”
From The House Party by Rita Cameron, published by William Morrow. Copyright © 2022 by Rita Cameron. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.
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