Mike Bradford pushed, twisted and cursed the child-proof cap, dumping red tablets onto his desk. He’d popped a couple while shaving, but the dull ache in his hip had grown into a throbbing pain by mid-morning. The prescription label called for two pills every four hours; he figured that three hours was close enough. Mike threw back a couple with a swallow of coffee and slowed his breathing, hoping for a few minutes of calm. He hadn’t found the “alternative” therapy of meditation effective in managing pain. However, finding a quiet island in the sea of chaos that typified the campus police station on a Monday morning was welcome for as long as it lasted. Which turned out to be barely a minute.
“Allen Arison is here to see you,” said Jenny, knocking on Mike’s office door and opening it in one move to keep Nebraska State University’s chief of police from avoiding what she knew would be an unpleasant encounter.
“The athletic director? What happened this weekend? A football player boosted a car or some basketball star assaulted a co-ed?”
“Chief, you have to start using appropriate language. Female students aren’t ‘co-eds’,” Jenny scolded. She managed both aggravation with, and adoration of, her boss. He’d been a homicide detective with the Denver Police Department, which struck Jenny as the big leagues of law enforcement.
“Let him in. I might as well have a pain in the ass to match the one in my hip,” he groaned.
The athletic director’s suit was as slick as his hair, and his handshake was as genuine as that of a used car dealer. But the man was powerful, maybe more so than anyone else on campus other Mike’s brother-in-law who was the university president. And some days, that hierarchy was in question.
“What can I do for you?” Mike asked, slowly lowering himself back into his chair as the athletic director sat across from him and leaned his forearms on the desk.
“There’s a situation that I need you to investigate with the greatest discretion,” Arison began, his breath carrying the minty vapors of a practiced schmoozer. A campus cop didn’t matter to him, but rich boosters don’t appreciate coffee breath.
Mike cocked an eyebrow and waited.
“As you probably know, there was a death at the opening game on Saturday.”
“I wasn’t at the game, but from what I’ve heard, I imagine that one of your players was crushed by a University of Nebraska linebacker.” Mike knew about the incident, having read his officer’s report, but couldn’t resist taking a jab. He loathed the dominant role athletics played even at a Division II institution like his. And having the Nebraska State Cannons start the season against college football’s legendary Cornhuskers was like throwing meat to the lions.
A 42 point loss and a smartass cop were not Arison’s ideal start to the fall semester. “I’m serious, Chief Bradford. Our mascot was found dead in the cheer squad’s locker room.”
“And evidently, Cannonball—that’s our mascot, right?—didn’t explode. Given the heat on Saturday afternoon, the poor bastard probably cooked inside that goofy costume.”
“The costume is designed to keep the mascot cool, and the preliminary autopsy report didn’t indicate heat stroke as the cause of death.” Arison took a manila folder from his briefcase and slid it across the desk. “We need to find out what happened before word of a student fatality leaks to the press and we have a full-blown scandal. And it won’t help that the kid was black.”
“I gather than ‘we’ pulled some strings to get the coroner’s attention on the weekend.”
“The university is the largest employer in the city of Fort Robinson, and we have good relations with local officials.”
“And ‘we’ pack a few thousand fans into town’s hotels and restaurants on game days, so everyone is just one big, happy family caring for our vibrant young scholars,” Mike said.
“I don’t need your sarcasm. I need your professional assistance.” The athletic director paused, then added, “That is, if you’re capable of working on this side of law these days.” Arison flashed a demeaning smile.
Both men knew—for that matter most everyone on campus knew—that Mike had been hired by his brother-in-law, the university president. As a Denver detective, Mike had taken a 9 mm slug in the hip. Following a long series of reconstructive surgeries, he downed prescription painkillers to pass the agility test and remain on the force. The drugs became as addictive as his need to be a cop. His ranking officer knew that for Mike a desk job was worse than no job. The lieutenant overlooked his detective’s foggy days and allowed Mike’s partner to cover for him, but videotape of Mike swapping fake pills for oxycodone in the evidence room couldn’t be ignored. The only way for Mike to stay in law enforcement was to resign and take a very large and painful step down from the demands of a metropolitan police force. So Mike swallowed his pride—a bitter pill—when his big sister maneuvered her presidential husband to hire him.
“I suppose we all do what we can to stay on the straight and narrow,” he said with a smirk. Rumor had it that the Arison resigned as the athletic director at Eastern Oklahoma University and came to NSU after he and a male cheerleader were seen exiting a local motel room on several occasions.
The men parted company with enough mutual enmity to fill the football stadium, where the Cannons had fizzled against the Cornhuskers—and Cannonball had fired his last shot.
***
Mike spent the rest of the morning meeting with a university committee charged with developing policies to reduce sexual assaults on campus. The student representative blamed the campus police for not doing enough. Since becoming the chief a year ago, Mike had hired two female officers to encourage reporting, but he felt like anything short of his having a sex change operation wouldn’t satisfy the activists.
Over a lunch of fried rice from Peking Express at the student union, Mike reviewed the autopsy report. According to the coroner, Jayden Parker was an African America male, age 21, 5 foot 10 inches, and 160 pounds. There were no signs of cerebral or pulmonary edema, blood aspiration, or cardiac dilation—classical indications of heat stroke.
The athletic department was half-way across campus and his hip was aching, but Mike figured that if he expected his officers to walk the campus, then their chief should do the same. He’d quit narcotics—as much as an addict ever quits—but the cost was a limp in proportion to the pain. When he arrived at Glenn Hall, named for the most beloved, if not the winningest, football coach in school history, the receptionist directed him through the cavernous atrium and down a hallway to the cheerleading coach.
At the appointed door, Mike looked into an office featuring a gigantic monitor on the back wall, which was showing cheerleaders doing handsprings along the sideline during Saturday’s game. He knocked softly and the high-backed desk chair swung around to reveal what appeared to be an adorable, high school student.
“Can I help you?” Meagan Plumb asked, with none of the bubbliness he expected.
“You’re the cheerleader coach?” Mike asked.
“I am. And I assume you’re a campus cop, here to ask questions about Jayden’s death. Mr. Arison told me you would be coming.” She stood up to shake his hand, and he figured her at under five feet and under a hundred pounds.
“I was asked to look into the matter,” he said, noting that her grip was impressively strong and remembering that today’s cheerleaders were more like gymnasts than the ditzy pompom girls of his high school days. He suspected that “ditzy” was one of the forbidden words on campus, along with “co-ed”.
“If you want to see what happened, pull up a chair,” she said. “I’m reviewing film to critique the squad’s routines and stunts. It’s nearly the end of the first quarter, so I’ll fast forward to get to what will interest you.” Mike watched attentively as the cheerleaders and mascot moved frenetically along the sidelines at triple speed. Shortly after they comically dashed back onto the field following halftime, Meagan paused the video. “Okay, here’s where things fell apart,” she said, returning the video to normal speed.
The film showed the cheerleaders standing on one another’s shoulders to build a human pyramid. As the final girl reached the top, she lost her balance and toppled backwards. The entire structure wobbled and Meagan hit the “pause” button.
“Watch what happens in slow motion.” She started the recording and narrated the action. “The spotter is well-positioned to catch Emmy. But here,” she stood and pointed to the screen, “you see how one of the men at the base pyramid steps back trying to keep his balance and knocks the spotter out of position.” Mike watched the falling cheerleader glance off the spotter’s outstretched arms and land with her leg twisted under her.
“I guess cheerleading these days is nearly as risky as what happens between the goalposts,” Mike said, trying to be sympathetic. “Unless we’re playing the Cornhuskers, in which case the sidelines are the place to be.”
Meagan shook her head at his lack of school spirit and cheerleading acumen. “Cheerleaders are athletes and injuries happen, just like on the field,” she said, as if by rote from having long battled for respect.
Mike was dubious, but he’d been on campus long enough to know that questioning the athleticism of cheerleaders or the golf team was asking for trouble.
“I can see where things went badly, but what does this reveal about Jayden Parker’s death?”
“Keep watching,” Meagan said.
The film showed medical staff rushing to the fallen cheerleader whose crooked ankle left little doubt of a serious break. All attention was directed to the writhing girl.
“There,” Meagan said, pausing the video and pointing. “In the background you can see Cannonball walking down the sidelines towards to the locker room.”
Mike suppressed a grin, picturing the mascot as a weaponized Kool-Aid Man, but knew better than to share his insight. Atop the spherical costume was what looked like a hat box with a giant pipe-cleaner fuse protruding to make Cannonball resemble a bomb, which Mike thought was probably a violation of some asinine university policy regarding non-violence. He kept that observation to himself as well.
“The guy looks wobbly, or is that how he always walks while wearing that costume?”
“Something was wrong, but nobody noticed because Emmy was badly hurt.”
“And by the time someone realized Cannonball was missing and went looking—”
“It was too late. A security guard found him collapsed in our locker room. The medical staff pulled him from the costume and did CPR but couldn’t revive him.”
“Do you think he overheated?”
“No. Jayden wore a cooling vest filled with ice water. He took a cool shower at half-time. And the costume has a built-in ventilation system.”
“Maybe dehydration, then?”
“Again, no. My team, including the mascot, is required to consume fluids on a strict schedule throughout the game.”
“And everybody draws their Gatorade from the same container?”
“There’s a cooler filled with a special mixture of electrolytes that I developed.” She paused and scowled. “What are you suggesting?”
“Just covering all the bases. Some college students realize that vodka looks like water and doesn’t make your breath smell. Amazingly, some rabble-rousers sneak alcohol into football games, and booze doesn’t go well with heat.”
Meagan stood up briskly, appearing far larger than her diminutive frame. “I resent that insinuation. My athletes would never drink alcohol during a game.”
“My apologies,” Mike said. Meagan gave a slight nod of acknowledgment and returned to her chair. Mike continued, “Would it be possible to speak with one of your cheerleaders?”
“Kristen is the captain. She will be here tomorrow morning to review film with me. I’ll have her to meet you in the cheerleaders’ locker room under the stadium at ten o’clock. I believe we’re done Chief Bradford,” Meagan said.
The top cop at NSU mumbled his thanks and limped back to the station. After changing into civvies, he headed downtown to the Narcotics Anonymous meeting in the basement of the Episcopal Church.
***
The next morning, Mike was shepherded by a work-study student who earned minimum wage for minimum labor as a gofer for the athletic department. The kid chattered his analysis of how the Cannons could’ve beaten their cross-state rivals if only for a few breaks. Mike figured the breaks would’ve required a couple dozen fumbles, a visiting quarterback’s concussion, and the ejection of the Cornhuskers’ entire defensive line, but he knew better than to reveal his lack of school spirit to a delusional student. They passed through a maze of fluorescent-lit concrete passages that connected Glenn Hall to the football stadium and finally the cheerleaders’ locker room.
The student worker returned to his job of delivering coffee to assistant coaches and Mike was soon joined by a young woman who moved like a dancer and introduced herself as Kristen. She exuded healthful sensuality, but her tight-fitting warmups didn’t suggest bimbo bustiness—a term that he added to his internal list of prohibited speech.
After exchanging pleasantries he asked, “Can you show me where Jayden was found and tell me about him, if it’s not too difficult.”
Kristen unlocked a door labeled “Cheer Squad” and flipped on the lights. The room lacked the carpeted luxury of the football team’s space. Raw functionality prevailed with concrete floors, overhead pipes, a trainer’s table stacked with rolls of athletic tape, and wooden benches between rows of tall metal lockers which Mike figured were a cheap way of separating the sexes (or were they genders, Mike wondered, never being able to discern the difference but knowing that it mattered to campus activists). A door at the far end of the room led out to the playing field.
“Jayden was a sweetheart,” Kristen said. “Everyone is devastated by his loss. Except maybe Kevin, but that’s not really fair to say.”
“Kevin?”
“Kevin Baker is Jayden’s backup and he’ll be the new mascot. Kevin was upset when he lost the tryout because he loves the Cannonball tradition and was really hoping for the scholarship that comes with being the mascot. But after a couple days got over his disappointment and started helping Jayden during practices. What’s more, Kevin never missed a squad meeting, which is saying something since he’s a chemistry major.”
“And you?”
“I’m a communications major,” she said. “It gives me time to captain the squad and will prepare me for a career in public relations.”
“Maybe I should pick your brain about how to improve the image of the campus police,” Mike said. “But for now, could you show me Cannonball’s costume?”
Kristen guided him to a corner of the locker room, where the spherical costume hung with limp arms and legs. She gestured with evident pride. “It’s a custom design and very expensive.
Kevin was the only one thinking clearly enough on Saturday to make sure the costume didn’t get trampled in the midst of the commotion.”
“I gather this is how somebody gets into the thing,” Mike said, pulling open the flap in the back of the costume with the ripping sound of Velcro. “Tell me about the custom features.”
“On top is a container that we fill with dry ice at the beginning of each half. The chamber seals tightly, so vapors come out through a vent hole. It looks like the fuse is smoking and Cannonball is about to explode,” she said with cheerleaderly enthusiasm.
“Neat. But how does someone see out? The mesh screen in the back flap wouldn’t be much help,”
“That screen is for ventilation. The wearer sees out the front. Step into it and you’ll understand.”
Mike struggled into the costume, despite his aching hip begging him not to.
“There’s a circle of dark plastic across the front,” Kristen said, “which blends into the surface of the costume. It’s ideal for day games and works okay with the stadium lights for night games.”
Mike looked through the dinner-plate sized window and could see reasonably well even in the dim light of the locker room. To get a feel for the costume, Mike asked Kristen to close the flap behind him. He walked a few steps, bumping into lockers and a rack of uniforms. Navigating a body nearly four feet wide would require practice, and the rubberized foam of the costume was heavier than he expected.
“It’s getting pretty warm in here,” Mike said, wondering if Kristen could hear him.
“You can try out the other feature,” came her muffled reply. “Reach up to the top and feel around for a little switch.”
Mike groped in the dark and flipped a toggle switch. A battery-powered fan whirred to life, pushing warm air out of a screen vent next to the dry ice chamber. He felt a draft on the back of his neck, where fresh air was drawn through the screen set into the entry flap. The costume wasn’t comfortable but he could imagine that it would be tolerable, particularly with an ice-water vest and cold drinks.
Mike called to Kristen to open the costume and he painfully extricated himself like an insect molting. In the course of backing out, he rested his hand on the back screen. It felt sticky, which struck him as odd. The outside surface felt just like screen door material. While the inside of the costume was stuffy, didn’t seem hot enough to make plastic become tacky.
“Is something wrong?” Kristen asked. Mike wasn’t sure whether his face was registering his discomfort or befuddlement. He went with the latter.
“Has anyone been working on the costume in the last couple of days?”
“I don’t know. If there was some damage during the commotion on Saturday, Kevin might have done repairs. Like I said, he’s devoted to the team and the tradition of Cannonball. But coach Plumb and Mr. Arison also have keys to the locker room.”
As Kristen speculated, Mike ran his hand around the interior of the costume. The surfaces were smooth, except for the upper screen which also felt sticky. The screens were certainly weak points in the costume, so it made sense that in a struggle to pull Jayden from his shell, there might’ve been damage.
Mike thanked Kristen and helped her hang the costume back in its place. He thanked her and walked through the door at the end of the locker room and onto the immaculate football field. He needed two things—a chance to pop a few pain pills and the opportunity to mull over a few thoughts.
The sun and the drugs worked their magic and Mike lapsed into something between dozing and free associating to fit together the fragments of what he’d learned: an athletic director trying to avoid a scandal, a cheerleader with a broken ankle, a student staggering off the field to die inside a rubberized foam ball, a coroner’s report dismissing heat stroke, a cheerleader coach denying the possibility of dehydration or intoxication, a new guy taking over the role and scholarship of Cannonball, and a potentially damaged and repaired costume with custom features.
Nothing came together, so he headed into the concrete coolness of the ground-level concourse and entertained himself by reading the signs. Fans were warned about drunk driving while being directed to the Cannon Club to buy ten dollar beers. At those prices, he mused, only the rich alumnae could afford inebriation. Every hundred feet there was a NO SMOKING sign, as if nicotine addicts needed constant reminders. He stopped in his tracks and smiled to himself, having found a smoking gun, or to be more exact, a nonsmoking cannonball. Mike headed straight to Meagan Plumb’s office without any hint of limp.
“Pause it right there,” Mike said and the cheerleader coach hit the button on the remote and freezing the action on the screen.
“What are you looking for?” she demanded, impatient with the interruption.
“When you showed me this yesterday, you pointed to Cannonball staggering toward the locker room.”
“And so?”
“So, what was missing from his costume?”
“Nothing that I can see.”
“That’s the answer—nothing. There’s no dry-ice vapors coming from around the fuse. When we watched the first half, I remember that there was wispy ‘smoke’ until early in the second quarter. It looked funny trailing behind the mascot at fast-forward speed, like Cannonball was trying to escape before he exploded. But here, we’re early in the third quarter and there’s no vapor. And if we wind it back to the start of the second half, I’ll bet there’s still nothing coming out. Kristen told me that the dry ice chamber was charged before the start of the game and again at halftime. ”
“Maybe somebody forgot.”
“Given your high expectations and team discipline, is it likely that varsity athletes skipped over their responsibilities?”
Mike knew that last bit was pure ass kissing and imagined that Meagan’s sculpted body would be kissable. He added this image to his ever-growing list of prohibited thoughts at the university. The cheerleading coach agreed that the missing ‘smoke’ was odd and said she would interrogate her squad. Mike asked her to keep this oversight quiet until he had a chance to see whether it amounted to anything important in terms of his investigation.
Mike headed back to the station and spent the afternoon at his desk, swimming upstream through the flood of paperwork. He skipped the NA meeting, picked up a to-go dinner at Thai One On, and spent the evening watching the Denver Broncos game, sipping a Scotch (which violated the rules for an addict), imagining how much better he’d feel with a couple of oxycodone in his bloodstream, and regretting that he’d skipped the meeting.
***
The Edmiston Physical Science Building was a concrete monolith reminiscent of Soviet architecture. Jenny had set up a late morning appointment for Mike to meet with the head of the chemistry department. Having taken the elevator to the seventh floor, Mike headed down the bleak hallway and knocked on Professor David Rosenberg’s door.
A cheerful “Come in!” brought Mike into the cluttered office.
“Doctor Rosenberg, I’m Chief Bradford from campus police,” Mike said, extending his hand. He’d learned to use academic titles to avoid bruising professorial egos. The aging and rumpled professor shook hands as if he’d been hoping for years to meet the NSU chief of police. Mike was delighted by the chemist’s lack of self-importance.
“Call me David. Now, what can I do for you?”
“Two things, David. First, I need your help with a science problem that I hope is within your scope of expertise.”
“I’m guessing it’s not something about designing metal-ligand platforms that exploit secondary-coordination interactions for controlling substrate binding, but I’ll do what I can,” he said with an impish grin.
“Suppose there was a sphere, maybe forty inches across,” Mike began. “And let’s say somebody wanted to fill it with carbon dioxide. How much dry ice would it take to do the job?”
The professor stepped to the blackboard beside his desk, swiftly erasing a set of cabalistic equations and wiping his chalky hand on the back of his pants.
“Let’s start with a simplifying assumption. Take it to be the case that we’re working with an ideal gas so that one mole, which would be forty-four grams in the case of carbon dioxide, would occupy about twenty-two liters. Next, we can calculate the volume of a sphere with a radius of twenty inches or we’ll say fifty centimeters…”
Mike couldn’t figure what moles had to do with chemistry, but guessed that the kindly scientist was using the term in some technical fashion rather than referring to the burrowing creatures that plagued the university golf course—a problem that he knew about from having been called out one night to investigate gunshots, which turned out to be a new groundskeeper’s approach to exterminating the subterranean pests by firing his shotgun into their lumpy tunnels along the fairways. While Mike was reminiscing about this strange nocturnal encounter, the cheerful professor was prattling on, scribbling calculations, and finally declaring, “And there we have it!”
Mike snapped back into the moment with the look of a daydreaming student called upon in class.
“What do we have?”
“We have about eighteen hundred grams, or around four pounds, being enough dry ice to do the job.”
“And would that fit into a container about the size of a hatbox?”
“I can’t imagine why you’re asking these questions, but I bet they have something to do with a police investigation that I’d be better off not knowing about,” Rosenberg said with a conspiratorial wink. “Say no more, but give me a minute to look up the density of dry ice.”
The professor pulled a huge book from a shelf behind his desk, flipped through the tome, ran his finger down a page, and declared that a hatbox would be plenty large enough to hold the requisite quantity of frozen carbon dioxide.
“I’m impressed that you can come up with answers so readily,” said Mike in genuine admiration.
“Pish, it’s nothing that a competent undergraduate couldn’t do on a take-home exam.”
“And that leads me to my other question. What can you tell me about a student, Kevin Baker?”
“He’s a strapping young man. Kevin isn’t the best student in our department, but he works hard and dogged determination can be more important that raw intelligence. I gather his parents are not well off, and he needs a scholarship to continue his studies at NSU. I tried to hire him for a few hours a week to work in my lab, but…”
“But?”
“I’m afraid he wasn’t comfortable with the idea of working for me.”
“Kids figure that anyone over forty is obsolete,” Mike said.
“It wasn’t my age, but my name that got in the way,” replied Rosenberg.
“I see.” Mike knew that for all of the diversity rhetoric on campus, Nebraska State was a very WASP institution.
The professor nodded and said, “I teach chemistry, but I hope that somewhere students learn tolerance. In the end, we must take them where they are and give them what we can. And what I gave Kevin was a job in the chemistry stockroom. He should be there this morning, if you’d like to talk to him.”
Mike thanked the professor after getting directions to the stockroom which was in the basement and had even less charm than the rest of the building. Kevin turned out to be a blond, blue-eyed hunk with the build of a gymnast. He didn’t seem to be the team player that Kristen had described, providing sullen, one word answers to Mike’s questions. Yes, he was the new mascot; yes, he’d moved the costume out of harm’s way on Saturday; no, there hadn’t been any damage; yes, there was cheerleading practice this afternoon (at three o’clock—the only answer of more than a single word, accompanied by a roll of his eyes to convey his aggravation at being questioned).
When Mike got back to the station, he called the county coroner with his hunch and the dour fellow agreed to reexamine the body. Then Mike called Allen Arison and told him to come to the cheerleaders’ locker room at the start of practice. Finally, he called Meagan Plumb and told her to send the squad out to the field but have Kevin wait with her in the locker room. He knew he should’ve asked rather than telling the athletic director and coach what he wanted, but a growing headache trumped institutional niceties. Mike washed down four red tablets with a cup of lukewarm coffee—two each for his head and his hip, although he doubted this medical logic justified the dose. However, he wanted to be as perky as a cheerleader for the afternoon showdown (‘perky’ being another term he added to his list of presumably prohibited speech, which he found ironic given the university’s claim to be a place of free thought and uncensored dialogue).
***
After a lunch of reheated Pad Thai from last night, Mike met with his sergeants to discuss the anticipated surge of laptop thefts and drunken frat boys at the start of a new semester. The meeting was breaking up when the coroner called back and confirmed Mike’s suspicion. With that information, he headed to the football stadium.
On the way across campus, Mike reviewed what he knew, what he thought he knew, and what he suspected. He normally would’ve wanted more in the first category before a showdown, but the puzzle seemed to go together in just one plausible way. A couple pieces were missing but they were sure to be found in the cheerleaders’ locker room—or so he hoped, not feeling entirely perky.
Mike stood outside the locker room, scraping his toe across the artificial turf and marveling at the countless, black rubber beads filling the spaces between the fake blades of grass. College football had come a long way from his days as a criminal justice major—a slacker degree program in the eyes of most students, but it got him into the police academy. Soon a dozen young men and women came bounding through the doorway, fell into formation, and began a series of stretches as Kristen called out commands.
Inside the locker room, Mike found Meagan sitting next to Kevin, who was demanding to know why he was being detained. Just as Mike began to answer, there was a brisk knock on the door at the opposite end of the cramped room and the athletic director strode in from the stadium’s interior.
“Chief Bradford, what the hell is going on?” he demanded.
“I’ll try to make effective use of your valuable time, as well as that of Ms. Plumb and Mr. Baker, who were kind enough to join us.” Arison waved his hand to indicate that the Chief should continue. Mike led the others to the costume hanging in a corner. “Would you and Coach Plumb please reach inside and tell me what you feel on the ventilation screens, where I’m shining my penlight.”
They did as directed and she said, “The surfaces are a little tacky.”
“So what?” Arison asked with annoyance.
“Those are sticky residues from athletic tape that was used to seal the costume at halftime of Saturday’s game while Jayden Parker was showering. Given the location of the screens, Jayden would not have noticed the tampering once inside the costume.”
“Are you saying that he suffocated in the opening minutes of the third quarter?” Meagan challenged.
“Not quite.”
“Then, what are you proposing?” demanded Arison.
“On top of the costume is a clever, customized feature. It’s a vinyl box with a protruding ‘fuse’ so that when dry ice is added to the container, the vapors leak out through a hole and create the appearance of smoke.
“And so?” asked Arison, now with more curiosity than irritation.
“And so, if you open the lid, I believe you’ll find the area around the inside of the exhaust hole is also sticky from someone having taped over the outlet. What’s more, I’m willing to bet that you’ll find a slit has been cut in the bottom of the box and into the top of the costume.” These were two of the “what he thought he knew” elements of the case.
Arison probed the container while Meagan looked on, being too short to see into the ice box. “The hole is tacky but there’s no slit,” he said.
“Coach Plumb, will you take my flashlight and look inside the costume, up toward where the dry ice container is mounted?” Mike said, handing her the penlight and desperately hoping she’d find some indication of tampering. He cursed himself for not having gathered the definitive evidence in advance, but his theory seemed too compelling to be wrong—a mistake he’d made in a couple of homicide cases during his days on the force. Now he began to wish he’d learned his lesson.
“There’s a patch, like you use on rafts or inflatable mattresses,” she said in a muffled voice, having leaned into the costume. Mike’s relief at this discovery was better than two red pills.
“So the slit has been repaired, but on Saturday it allowed carbon dioxide from the dry ice to flow into the costume, where it rapidly built up to toxic levels after halftime.”
“That explains why there was no ‘smoke’ coming from around Cannonball’s fuse in the third quarter when we watched the film,” said Meagan, now turning to look at Kevin who’d been sitting quietly on a bench between the lockers.
“Exactly. And the container holds enough dry ice to produce sufficient carbon dioxide to fill the interior of the costume. Professor Rosenberg ran all of the calculations for me yesterday and explained that a capable chemistry major, such as Mr. Baker, would be able to do the same.”
“That’s just wild speculation,” Kevin said. “The costume was continually being repaired for one thing or another. Jayden must have collapsed from heat stroke.”
“It would seem that way,” said Mike, “but the coroner dismissed that as a cause of death. However, I had him reexamine the body today. He found what are called petechiae spread across Jayden’s skin. I knew about these red spots from my time as a homicide detective. Little hemorrhages under the skin of a victim’s face are a sure sign of strangulation, but in cases of suffocation the telltale spots are generalized. They’re very hard to see, unless you look closely, under the skin of a black victim.”
There was a long silence. Finally, Kevin looked directly at Meagan and said matter-of-factly as if to exonerate himself, “I didn’t mean for him to die. He was just supposed to feel dizzy and ask for help, so you would figure that he couldn’t stand the heat and didn’t have what it took to be the mascot.”
“But a cheerleader fell and broke her ankle,” I said. “And that disrupted your plan, right?” Now Kevin looked at me with the disdain he’d exhibited in the chemistry stockroom.
“Yeah. All the medical staff and the cheerleaders were focused on her. Jayden headed to the locker room to find help. I was busy keeping the sidelines clear so the EMTs could work on Emmy. By the time I went to look for Jayden, a security guard had found him and called for help.”
“Being Cannonball meant that much to you?” Meagan asked with a hint of sympathy for a student who evidently felt such passion for his school.
Kevin shook his head and gave a throaty chortle. “It was the scholarship you dumb bitch. Twenty grand a year. And you gave it to a black kid to be politically correct.”
Meagan stepped toward Kevin, her hand swept back and then forward with stunning speed. Mike figured that a slap constituted a form of affirmative action, although probably not one approved by the university.
___________________________________
Bio:
Jeffrey A. Lockwood grew up in New Mexico and spent youthful afternoons enchanted by feeding grasshoppers to black widows in his backyard. He earned a doctorate in entomology and worked for 15 years as an insect ecologist at the University of Wyoming before metamorphosing into a Professor of Natural Sciences & Humanities in the departments of philosophy and creative writing. His writing has been honored with a Pushcart Prize, the John Burroughs award, IPBA Silver Medal, and inclusion in the Best American Science and Nature Writing. He wrote the libretto for the acclaimed Locust: The Opera which premiered in 2018.
