The room was a vacuum of silence as we waited for him to reveal what he had found. As the bag opened, he reached inside, and I noticed for the first time that the hand he was using had a flesh-toned rubber glove on. Gently, he pulled out a piece of cloth, and I immediately recognized what it was.
“That’s a piece of a flannel shirt,” I said.
“Son of a bitch!” Tyler yelled. “Danny wears those all the time. Same color and everything. It’s damn near his uniform.”
“Exactly,” Dallas said. “I don’t know how the police missed this, honestly. It was caught on part of the fencing around the back of the bar. Most of that fence was torn down by the fire department when they went to put out the fire, and there were track marks over part of it. But when I looked really closely, this was stuck under one of the poles.”
“We have to take that to Danny’s and confront him,” Jordan said. “We need to do it and do it now. Make him explain how one of his shirts ended up at the bar.”
“Hang on,” I interrupted. “We can’t go marching into his bar all pissed off.”
“Are you serious?” Jordan nearly screamed. He was only a foot away from me, and after a tense moment, he spun on his heel and slammed his hand on a table. “This is stupid. We should go and confront him, and you all know it.”
“What we need to do,” I said, keeping my voice calm, “is to call the police.”
“The police?” Jordan exploded. “The police who can’t be bothered to investigate? The police who missed a piece of Danny’s flannel on the fence? The police who have acted like we were bothering them when we were just waiting on them to do their job and investigate a crime?”
“Yes,” I said. “We need to go about this the right way.”
“The right way,” Jordan said, crossing his arms and sitting on one of the open chairs. “The right way is punching Danny in his dumb fucking face until he admits what he’s done.”
“The right way,” Mason said, speaking from across the table at Jordan and making direct eye contact with him, “is to do this by the book, until the book is over. Then, if it turns out he did it and we still don’t get justice, then we will make our own. Isn’t that right, Tom?”
I stared at Mason and then back to Jordan for a moment, then nodded and stood up.
“Thank you again, Dallas. I think we will bring that to the police station,” I said.
“If you don’t mind, I won’t be accompanying you. Police investigators tend not to have a terribly high opinion of PIs. I have a feeling my presence would do you boys a disservice,” Dallas said. “But please take this as well. It’s a photograph of the evidence with a timestamp before I removed it. That way there is no question that it’s legit.”
I nodded. “Fair enough. I’ll call you if we hear anything from them,” I said and held out my hand.
“And I’ll call if I find anything else out,” he said as he took my hand and shook it.
By the time we got to the police station, it was midafternoon, and the place was mostly dead. Officers were coming in and out, switching shifts, and we were directed to wait for the detective handling our case now. A good half hour later, we were called back into a small office just off the main bullpen. It seemed like a generic office, rather than a personal one, and by the look of the detective, our case was being handled by someone who was barely out of diapers.
“Detective Samburg,” the skinny young man said as he held out his hand for me to shake. I did and he motioned to a seat. I took the one across from the desk he sat at, and my brothers filed in behind me, standing or sitting wherever there was space.
“Detective, nice to meet you,” I said.
“Likewise. Now tell me why you’re here? I believe you were told I would be in touch tomorrow?” he said with a touch of impatience.
“We were,” I said, “but something has come up.”
“Oh, do you need to reschedule? That could have easily been done with the operator downstairs. You didn’t need to come all the way in,” he began. Mason cut him off by tossing the paper bag onto the desk. Detective Samburg blinked as he looked at it and then moved his gaze back to me. “What the hell is this?”
“Open it,” I said. “It’s evidence. Your officers missed it.”
Detective Samburg opened the bag and peered inside.
“It looks like a piece of a flannel shirt,” he said.
“Correct,” I said. “We handled it with gloves the entire time, so if you needed to try to get DNA or prints off it, it hasn’t been contaminated by us.”
Detective Samburg’s eyes narrowed, and then one eyebrow went up. He reached inside his desk and pulled out a box of latex gloves, slipping one on his left hand and then using it to pull the shirt piece out.
“So you boys thinking of getting into detective work, or…”
“I hired a PI,” I said. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, the detective’s face dropped.
“You did what?”
“We,” Jordan interrupted, “hired a PI. Because you guys aren’t doing shit. You haven’t taken our case seriously from day one, treated us like we were annoying you because we dared to want to know how our place burned down, and then actively ignored us when we said we thought we knew who it was. And now you have proof.”
“A flannel shirt?” he asked.
“Danny wears them all the time,” Tyler said.
“Who’s Danny?” the detective asked.
“Christ,” Tyler said, shaking his head.
“The other bar owner, down the street,” Mason said. “The one who had a competitor’s bar burn once before already. The one who hated us for being more successful. The one who is suddenly booming with business now that we aren’t around. That one.”
Detective Samburg opened up his drawer again, pulling out a plastic zip bag, and put the shirt piece inside. Then he took off the glove and tossed it away, folding his hands together in the center of the desk.
“Look, I know you guys are very frustrated, but you have to understand, there could be a million reasons why a piece of a flannel shirt was near your bar. And better yet, you have no idea whose flannel shirt piece that is. It could be anyone’s,” he said.
“It could be,” I said. “But we believe it’s Danny’s. You should check into him. We’ll call back tomorrow.”
I opened the door of the hotel room, trying to juggle two large paper bags filled to the brim without dropping them. Once it was open, I stuck my foot out to hold it and saw Amanda’s surprised face over the top.
“What in the world?” she asked, hurrying over to help me. “This smells amazing. Did you get Chinese?”
“I did,” I said, setting one bag down on the table by the couch. Amanda set the other next to it, and we started emptying them both. “So, I didn’t know what you liked, and I figured we have this fridge here, why not get a little bit of everything?”
“Did you order the entire menu?” Amanda asked as the seemingly endless bags were emptied. A stack of dishes on one side was starting to lean.