[b]Surrey
Cascadia Territory[/b]

Inspector Mark Echols stood with his coat up against the light drizzle, a smoldering butt of a cigarette in his mouth. The first traces of dawn were beginning to show on the far horizon. Very soon the sun would be rising and they could get rid of the harsh halogen lights that made the lot look washed out. There were six lights in all that were erected in a circle around the primary crime scene. Police scientists working under Echols combed the small radius for any sign of clues. He stood a dozen yards away, watching as a flashbulb popped from inside the circle. Echols figured it would take a few minutes for the strong scent of the bulb’s zirconium to waft to his location.

Echols squinted through the dim light and read his wristwatch. It was just after one in the morning when he’d gotten the call from the local precinct out here, a couple parked in a back alley lot to find a spot to neck and instead found a dead body. Echols was just one hour into his shift as watch commander for the CTPF’s homicide division when he left for the scene. The duties of watch commander entailed being the first of two detectives on duty during the graveyard shift of midnight to eight. One of the techs waved him over. Echols stubbed his cigarette butt on the heel of his shoe and shoved it into his coat pocket before limping over.

The limp was his keepsake from the war. Echols was an MP during the war with the US, he worked behind the front lines and interrogated the few POWs the NWC army managed to snag. Then came the NWC’s own civil war that tore the army apart. Echols’ own MP unit was ripped apart and he saw some rough fighting not far from here. He came out the war one kneecap shy of a pair, but the snazzy cane helped compensate for that.

“What have we got?” he asked the tech.

“Nothing at all,” the overweight man said with a shrug. “No fibers, no bruising or lacerations around his hands or wrists. No scars or tattoos and obviously no identification on him.”

Echols looked down at the dead body. It was the naked corpse of a man who appeared to be in his mid to late 30’s. He was on the fat side and had dark hair with a dark, scraggly beard. He had a neat little bullet hole in the back of his head. 

“What about his dick?” Echols asked, referring to the erection the dead man sported hours after his death.

“He had a hard-on when he died, that’s for sure. I don’t know if it was part of the fight or flight response or if he was aroused when he was shot. The human body, man, it’s a mysterious thing. Medical examiner will be able to give you a better answer if he does an autopsy, though.”

Echols nodded and crouched down to look. Even with the dim lighting and hair covering the wound Mark could make out the stippling around the hole, a dead giveaway that the shooter had been in close. Execution style, Echols thought to himself. He stood up and turned to look across the river at the skyline of Vancouver. It was close enough to dump a body, just 26 kil-… miles, sixteen some odd miles away. He had to start thinking of distances in miles and feet now. This was the third murder of the year for the whole territory. Cascadia had settled down once the militant rebels had been swept from the board, but this murder was a reminder to Echols that something dark and violent seemed to lurk beneath the surface of this place. 

“Okay,” he finally said to the tech and his team. “Run his prints by R&I and see if they get a match. I’ll run through the recent missing persons reports and see if our guy comes up. If you find anything else interesting, give me a call.”

The tech gave Echols a half-hearted nod as the inspector started to hobble across the lot towards his unmarked car. He drove back into Vancouver with the radio scanner off, lost in his thoughts. He thought about the new case he had on his hands, crossed referenced it in his mind with any old murders he’d worked in the past and couldn’t find anything close to this. 

Dawn was steady approaching by the time he got back to CTPF headquarters. It was a six-story building downtown with the CTPF’s logo above the entrance. The Cascadia Territory Police Force acted as successor to the NWC’s own federal police. It was still a relatively new agency that had the task of enforcing the territory’s laws as well as any US laws that the Feds didn’t investigate. In effect they were state police. Echols had been a detective in Vancouver PD before the war, but the VPD was reluctant to bring him back after his injury. The CTPF had no qualms and brought him in to work murders. A lot of his old friends at VPD no longer spoke to him because he took the job. In their eyes he was a traitor for allying with the same people they went to war with. Echols didn’t give a damn about flags and territory. All he wanted to do was catch bad guys.

“How was the night watch?” Echols asked Braun as he shuffled through the door.

“I got to catch up on my reading,” Sergeant Sam Braun said with a chuckle. He looked up at Echols over his reading glasses, a paperback in his lap. “Have fun with the stiff in Surrey? Hey, that sounds like a great title for a detective novel. The Stiff in Surrey: An Inspector Echols Mystery.”

Echols rolled his eyes and made the jerk-off motion. To say the homicide division’s offices were cramped would be an understatement. Six detectives shared the small office space on the fifth floor, three desks between each of them. The shifts worked so that at any given time there would only be two detectives on duty, but a redball situation might require more people and that would make things very claustrophobic very quickly. Echols sat down at his desk and put a fresh sheet of paper into the typerwriter. He started to clack out his preliminary report in a slow and deliberate manner, searching and pecking on the keys one by one. Halfway through he leaned back and looked over at Braun who was back reading his book.

“Speaking of stiff, Sam, you ever encountered a dead body with a stiffy?”

“Once,” said Braun, “but that was a sex strangling thing. You know, a guy gets off on choking himself fucks up and ends up killing himself. That kind of thing, but never a murder where the vic was at attention.”

Echols picked up a pencil on the desk and chewed it pensively while he thought. He gave up after a minute and tossed the pencil down before he started back on the report. He could mull over the circumstances of the murder when he was done with his report. Echols attached a supplemental request to Ava, the homicide unit’s secretary, for her to forward a request for more information and the physical description of the victim to the CTPF’s missing persons unit, as well as every detective bureau in the territory and to the state agencies in Washington and Idaho in the south.

“Early relief,” James Rolston of the day shift announced as he sauntered through the door. “Rise and shine, assholes. Look alive, sadsacks. Time to head home.”

Echols grunted and handed Rolston the two reports he had just finished typing.

“Here you go. Read those and put the reports in Ava’s inbox. Anything about the case comes in, you know where to reach me.”

Rolston gave Echols a little salute and walked past him as Echols grabbed his cane and made his way out of the office. He’d probably go home, sleep, and then be back to the office before five that evening to work follow ups. The case was shaping up to be a loser, a stone whodunnit with very little chance of getting solved. All the other detectives in the unit would softball it and wait for a juicer one to fall into their lap, but Echols couldn’t let it go. He wanted to catch bad guys, and now he had a chance.

[b]Washington, D.C.[/b]

Clay Fulke walked through the corridors of the West Wing with his escort leading the way. Today marked the new president’s first meeting with congressional leaders, his first such meeting since becoming Speaker. Clay toiled for sixteen years in the House, acting first as Whip when Vice President Reed was Speaker and then as Majority Leader before Reed’s successor retired after thirty years in the House. 

President Norman’s congressional goals were still something of a mystery in DC. His campaign and inaugural speeches had all been filled with vague promises to make the country better, to change the tide of the 20th century and turn the next hundred years into a century of American prosperity. Easier said than done, Clay thought. The only thing that he had heard Norman wanted to do this session was make headway on civil rights in the South and get some kind of timetable on statehood for the Cascadia Territory. Both would be tough challenges with a solid majority of southern power in both the House and Senate, but if Norman could pull it off it may end up being a good sign that he wasn’t just talk.

The young White House staffer led Clay to the conference room just off from the Oval Office. The majority leader, Harris Hayden, was already there along with Senate minority leader Clark Peters. Clay and the majority and minority leaders made up the top three Democrats in the House and Senate. They took their places around the table and waited for the president and vice-president.

“Gentlemen,” Russell Reed said with a large smile as he came through the door. He glad-handed the men and welcomed them in. They were just sitting down when President Norman entered, not through the same door as the others, but through the door that led straight to the Oval Office. He held a hand out to stop everyone from standing back up.

“No need for that,” he said as he sat. “Thank you all for meeting with me. I just wanted to have this meeting as a preliminary discussions before I meet with the Republican congressional leaders, map our strategy out before we test the waters. Like any good military man, I want to scout the battlefield in advance.”

A slight chuckle went out. Clay saw the slight look the president and vice-president shared before Reed leaned forward to speak.

“One suggestion the administration has been kicking around is in the area of national defense. That was one of the president’s campaign cornerstones, and the Republicans are always for that so we could start out with a softball piece of legislation before we get into the tougher stuff.”

“What did you have in mind?” Clay asked with a raised eyebrow. 

“New England Weapon Industries has been struggling to keep its head above water for years, and since the New England Republic was absolved back into the US it’s on the verge of bankruptcy.”

“We want to nationalize it,” the president said, picking up the train of thought from Reed. “Kickstart it with federal government investment, use incentives to attract quality weapons designers to work there. I’m tired of relying on other nation's weapons to protect our troops, I have been for a long time. I think it’s a first step in the right direction if we can turn NEWI into the US armed force’s personal armory. Thoughts?”

“I like it,” Hayden replied. “National defense is something everyone wants to vote for, all the voters are for it.”

“Shouldn’t have a problem going through the House,” said Clay. “We can get it through in record time. The Senate is where I’d be concerned. The Republicans have been fighting back hard on anything that still smells like socialism, and nationalizing a company falls within that purview.”

“This theoretical bill would provide just compensation for NEWI’s owners and shareholders,” said the vice-president. “I think that little caveat would appease the Republican’s ideological need to be difficult. What do you think, Clark?”

“It’d be close,” Peters said after a moment’s pause. “Very close.”

“Off the top of my head,” Reed said quickly. “I could see the bill passing the Senate… 75-21, that’s give or take a vote or two. The new senators haven’t had time to create a voting record.”

“Nobody can count votes like the vice-president,” the president said with a laugh. “But let’s just assume it’ll be close that way we can’t rest on our laurels on this one. This will be this administration's first big challenge and I want to see we come out of it on the right side of it.”