Jaycee Woods

I woke from a dream with some thoughts on my shelved “Star Chamber” story, or maybe it is a second one. 🙂

The focus of the story is two homicide detectives, one an older pessimist while the other a fresh go-getter idealist. They are frustrated by a series of apparently unrelated murders of criminals who got off on a technicality, received early release, or could never be prosecuted due to lack of evidence. The pessimist wants to low ball those investigations because “the trash is taking itself out.” The idealist pushes forward trying to solve the crimes.

Their street informant–cuz every story has a Smokey–is a young Cleaver. Before his days of leading the rebel army at the siege of Pilgerruh in Boudica and The Butcher, Cleaver started out as a petty criminal and gang member in Cleveland. Cleaver provides information to the cops to take out his criminal rivals. Cleaver’s theory on the unsolved unrelated murders is that it is a cop fixing the justice system’s mistakes. These are the events that led him later into the political activism racket that ended with his rebel military leadership in the future civil war.

The one man “Star Chamber” is a paraplegic cop who works at the evidence warehouse. The other cops gave him the nickname Super Cop. While the idealist detective thinks this is a pejorative about his position and disability, the pessimistic detective knows that it is because other cops come to him for advice on cases and neighborhood problems. Meanwhile the paraplegic cop uses his position and connections to manipulate others in his secret quest for his vision of justice, killing the criminals who are falling through the cracks.

The paraplegic cop got his disability getting shot on the job, which is how the union secured him a position in evidence management. His first kill was the criminal who shot him. After he started killing other criminals who got away with it despite the sympathetic victims. He doesn’t always kill directly as often he orchestrates one criminal killing another as a twofer. Secretly he is no longer a paraplegic due to stem cell treatments in the Caribbean; however, he maintains the appearance that he is wheelchair bound.

Not sure how it ends. Perhaps the detectives figure it out but the paraplegic cop tampered with all the evidence so no case could ever be made against him. If so, do the detectives simply walk away accepting that for once a defect in the system is correcting the problems created by the other defects?

Note this isn’t advocacy but storytelling. Dramatizing something naturalistic and looking at the choices inside.

Why did my subconscious do this? Maybe it was a video I watched yesterday about the lab tech who didn’t do her job which undermined the convictions for which she worked on the evidence.