Par Four - Softcover

THERE WAS PLENTY TO LOVE ABOUT MY ROOMY NEW OFFICE AT the end of the hall, beginning with a gleaming brass nameplate on the door that read "Lt. Jake Hines, Investigations." I intended to take my time moving in Tuesday morning and get all my stuff put away before I worried about earning my pay raise. But Lulu Breske blindsided me before I even got my computer set up. I was crawling around behind the desk, trying to remember how the monitor plugs into the CPU, when she banged the door open and yelled, "Jake Hines! You in here?"

She startled me, and I jumped. My head hit the corner of the desktop, and for a few seconds I thought maybe I'd gone blind.

"Jesus, Lulu." I groped my way to my feet and rubbed my head, where a lump was rising. "What are you hollering about? I'm right here."

"How come you never answer my messages?" She aimed her clipboard at me like an Uzi. "Three times, I called you yesterday. What's the matter, you forget how to work your voice mail? Okay, your CID is set for seven-thirty tonight, sign here." She pointed to the line with my name on it.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I lied. "What CID?"

"The drug bust, the high-speed chase, whatever that screwup was Sunday night. That's your name right there, isn't it? Know any other Jake Hines in the department? So sign it, and I'll be outta here."

"Aw, Lulu, that wasn't my collar, I just happened to get in the way by accident."

"Argue with the chief about that. He says notify everybody on the list, I'm gonna notify everybody."

"Well, I don't have time for any meetings right now, Lulu. I'm buried in paperwork." I waved my arm at my clean, empty desk. All the junk I usually keep there was still sitting in boxes on the floor.

Lulu stared at the shiny wood veneer for a couple of seconds. "Uh-huh." She turned to the door. "So, you want me to put down here that you're refusing your CID?"

"Of course not," I said, indignantly. It hadn't even occurred to me to refuse it. I was just trying to weasel out of it.

CID is copspeak for Critical Incident Debriefing. Conventional wisdom in the law enforcement community now says cops who encounter high-stress situations should debrief as soon as possible. We're supposed to blow off any leftover emotions that might be hanging around, so we won't turn into a bunch of crazies and self-destruct. Somebody noticed the high rate of alcoholism and suicide cops have, I guess, and decided we need counseling.

And not just cops. Firefighters after big fires, medical crews that work disasters, they're all being encouraged to sit around afterward and tell how it happened. They're supposed to say how they felt about it, too, like, "I keep

hearing that woman scream," or, "I feel like I never want to eat again." Sometimes, I've heard, they even hug.

"It's an idea whose time has come," an intern named Josh Hyde told me, beaming as if he'd just found gold in his sock. He helped with a Jaws of Life extrication on the highway after an eight-car pileup. Describing the debriefing he attended afterward, he said a couple of paramedics got into a screaming match, and a driver named Manahan cried.

"That made them feel better?"

"I don't know about them," he said. "But I sure got rid of a lot of baggage." Josh picks up jargon fast.

CIDs are usually run by peers, volunteers who get extra training in counseling. You can tell when somebody's signed up to be a debriefer. He starts toting books around with titles like A Team Approach to Stress Management. A guy whose conversation has reliably been along the lines of "How about those Twins?" will start using words like epiphany, and sooner or later he'll probably say, "We feel it's helpful to get those feelings out in the open where we can deal with them."

Which was just what I didn't want to do. Dodging an occasional bullet is an inconvenience I can live with, but spilling my guts in public is not. I'm not a big hugger, and I got more than my share of counseling while I was growing up as a ward of the state of Minnesota. Now that I'm a grown-up, I try not to let strangers mess with my head.

By accident, though, I got in the middle of a high-speed chase and a questionable arrest last Sunday night that left all the participants unhappy. When the chief heard the details, he set up a CID. Lulu's task, as his secretary, was to make sure I got word of the time and place. Mine, as I saw it, was to stay out of her sight till it was over or she forgot about me, whichever came first.

My phone rang. I pounced on it like a dog on a bone.

"Rowdy's Bar's been robbed," Schultzy said from the dispatch desk. I could hear the backchatter from the other consoles nearby. "They say the owner's taped up in the basement, and the safe is wide open."

"Anybody responded?"

"I sent two cars, Stearns and Donovan, but Ed says send an investigator. I can't find anybody, where is everybody? Can you go?"

I opened my mouth to say, "I'm not even moved into my new office yet," but Lulu was standing there with her list, so I said, "Sure. Hold on a sec."

I put the phone against my chest and said, "Got an emergency, Lulu. Robbery call, possible injury."

"Fine. But I notified you about your CID, so now you know," Lulu said. "Seven-thirty tonight in the small meeting room, go or don't go, no skin off my nose." She stomped out noisily on her tortured heels.

To the phone, I said, "You send an ambulance?"

"They don't think they need one. You decide. You want the address? Fourteen--"

"I know it." My second year in college, I dealt hamburgers off the arm at Rowdy's Bar. "This owner, you mean Babe Krueger, right?"

"Uh . . . don't have that information. It'll be whoever's in the basement wrapped up in duct tape, I guess."

"You sent a fingerprint team yet?"

"No. You think?"

"Uh-huh. Soon's you can get 'em up there." Rowdy's must have fingerprints going back to the Hoover administration. Getting a team there fast might make the exercise marginally less futile. Physical evidence in a bar is always a can of worms. Everything's sticky and smells like secondhand beer. Rowdy's has a restaurant and pool hall, too, so add fifty years of grease and chalk dust.

Wait till Lt. Jake Hines sees how he'll have to earn his promotion to Chief of Detectives in Rutherford, Minnesota. The break-in at Rowdy's Bar looks routinetwo would-be burglars surprised owner Babe Krueger (and vice versa) as she was counting th e weekend's take, taped her to a chair, and made off with $28,000but the sequel is anything but. Item: the robbery may be just the latest in a quietly alarming string of thefts. Item: Babe is hacked to death only hours after Jake interviews her. Item: the two kids who confess to the robbery seem to forget all sorts of important details about it. Item: one of the two is ominously linked to the lowlife who's just kidnaped little Jessica Schultz, the police dispatcher's bratty but lovable daughter. And what does the whole mess have to do with a crack epidemic Jake's detective squad is convinced has arrived in peaceful Rutherford on the wings of Eugene Soames, the fleeing suspect who capped his high-speed chase by plowing into Jake's brand-new pickup while th e Chief of Detectives was celebrating his promotion out on the links? With such a scorching crime wave heating up the town, there's no time for Jake to deal with the news that his ladylove Trudy Hanson, the state's photograph-and-fingerprint expert, is pu lling up roots to move to San Francisco. Miraculously, Jake hitches up his britches and ties up all the loose ends, making his second appearance (Foul Play, 1997)except for the unbelievable casting of his archcriminala model of the small-town procedural. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.