The Snow Angel (3 page)

Kane was almost proud of this reputation. Billy once asked him why he stayed on the job. “It's a game,” Kane had replied, “matching wits with these idiots.” And occasionally his work actually helped nail some prick who was victimizing the truly innocent. Part of Ralph Kane was still an altar boy.

Plus, God knew, he didn't want a boring life—or one like Billy's. So what else could he do?

Kane passed through the revolving glass door into headquarters, then badged his way past the security checkpoint. In the lobby, on the way to the elevator, he passed a gaily decorated Christmas tree.
You can't escape the Christmas horseshit anywhere, not even here.

Now dressed in jeans, sweatshirt and black leather jacket, Ike Bell pushed his white Ford down the expressway into the city, code three. Traffic was light because of the snow. Bell had not informed Dispatch about the light and siren. New directives required command authorization for plain-car code-three runs. The Third Floor had gotten the word from the City Attorney about liability. But Easterly had told him to get in as fast as possible, so he took that as command authorization.

Bell turned on the AM radio as he splashed along in the number one lane. Under the rise and fall of the siren, a black councilman debated with the white head of a homeowner's group about the city's endless racial tensions. After all these years, the police of this city still behaved like an occupying army, the councilman declared, harassing people of color at any opportunity.

“That's because ‘people of color' are the ones committing most of the crime!” the white man spat sarcastically.

“That's a racist comment!” the councilman said.

“Oh, yeah? Get a scanner and listen to police calls, any night of the week!” the white man shouted. “Listen to the descriptions of the criminals!”

“That's a very small percentage of black people!” the councilman shouted back. “Most of their victims are other black people!”

”Which is exactly why
you people
need to support the police…!”

Bell, sick of this endless debate, changed stations. He heard “Jingle Bells” and turned the radio back off. He exited the expressway and rolled through the deserted downtown streets.

B
y noon, a task force had been mobilized, two dozen of the city's savviest street cops, drawn from various precincts and detective squads. All but three were male. Now they were assembled for a briefing in the headquarters gymnasium, out of sight of the press.

This being a Sunday, the usual media people were not hovering around headquarters. A couple of television crews had shown up at the crime scene after hearing something on the police radio. But a quick-thinking precinct lieutenant told them it was a domestic quarrel over child custody, nothing more. The weather was so nasty that no one stayed. They didn't realize that this was the home of the local child celebrity, so the task force had a few hours head start on the story.

Here at headquarters, a rumor was circulating among the cops: an in-house beat reporter from the
Daily Times,
a guy widely regarded as an egotistical prick, had gotten wind that something big was brewing. But Chief of Detectives Byron Slaughter had pigeonholed him. A child's life was at stake, Slaughter warned, and if the reporter said a premature word to his editors or anyone else, his wife would learn about the police-officer girlfriend he had on the side. The reporter saw the wisdom in keeping his mouth shut. And the rumor only further enhanced the cops' considerable respect for Slaughter.

Now, awaiting the briefing, Kane stood alone against the back wall of the gym, arms folded. He wore the Beretta in a shoulder rig over a denim shirt.

Clear across the room, Isaiah Bell sat with his enormous body sprawled across a folding chair. Kane covertly studied him. He'd heard

Bell had found religion.
The asshole probably prays to some Black Christ…

Bell glanced around and spotted Kane staring at him. Their eyes locked momentarily before Kane looked away.
Mother-fuck,
Bell thought,
this just isn't my day.

He knew exactly why Kane was here. From an operational point of view it made sense. But Bell had spent the last twenty-three years avoiding the little bastard. You can do that in a big police department. It had worked out fine, until today.

Inspector Roberta Easterly, still a looker at forty-five, walked in to conduct the briefing. In her business suit, she looked more corporate executive than cop. She was flanked by Slaughter and the city's new Chief of Police, Jefferson Mosely, also wearing suits.

Mosely, an African American, had been in town for only a month. He was still floundering around in this new department, here in one of the nation's most dangerous cities. The word on Mosely was that he still hadn't even learned the names of the major streets.

The city's police, already stung by the appointment of an outsider, were openly suspicious of the newcomer, freshly hired away from Dallas. Many a secretive phone call had been placed to contacts in the Dallas P.D., who universally described Mosely as politically crafty but a second-rate cop—and a backstabber. He knew how to play the racial angles, they said, so he had been popular with the so-called “black community” in Dallas. But the rank-and-file Texas officers, white and black, detested him.

Now, at the briefing, Mosely wisely deferred to Byron Slaughter and Bobbie Easterly. He was smart enough to appear in civvies. The old-line cops resented an outsider wearing their cherished uniform, regardless of title.

On the other hand, even the most reactionary males in the department respected Easterly. She pre-dated affirmative action, so had made rank the hard way. It helped that, as a rookie, she had won the Medal of Valor for rescuing a wounded policeman under fire.

So the working stiffs didn't think of Easterly as a woman. To them she was a
cop.
Behind her back they called her “Ballsy Bobbie.” Her passion in life, which she had honed to an art form, was catching evil people who did terrible things to good people. Everyone in the room would go to the wall for a skipper like Easterly.

The rank-and-file held Byron Slaughter in similar esteem. At fifty-six, he was at the second level of department command, his pay grade equivalent to that of a Deputy Chief. There were two other Deputy Chiefs—both of them away for Christmas—plus a fourth Deputy slot,
which was vacant.

“Okay, listen up,” Easterly addressed the task force. “I'm sorry to screw up your weekend. But you people are the best of the best, and we really need you.”

Easterly held up a blown-up photograph of a light-skinned black boy, his smile radiating innocence. He seemed familiar to many in the room.

“Here's our victim, age seven,” Easterly said. “His name is Darryl Childress. Darryl's a child actor who has appeared in several local fast-food commercials. Perhaps you or your kids have seen him on TV. I don't have any children and I don't watch much television, but I'm told he has a large following. Kids apparently love him.”

Easterly checked her watch. “Darryl was grabbed by two male suspects a little less than four hours ago from the front yard of his family home in the Seventeenth Precinct, the 14000 block of Lawndale Avenue. He was in the yard building a snowman. His parents were inside dressing for church. They're professional people—he's a teacher, she's a nurse. It's a racially mixed marriage—he's white, she's black. This is their only child.

“Darryl's mother happened to look out the window and got a fleeting look at the suspects. She saw them pull the boy into a car. In the struggle, he lost one of his gloves, which we've recovered. The vehicle is a late-model gray sedan with tinted windows, make and plates unknown. She didn't get a look at their faces. But she's positive one is white and the other black. They took off eastbound.

“That's all we know. The forensics people are at the scene trying to reconstruct what's left of footprints and tire tracks. Unfortunately, the mother ran outside and trampled the snow. Then the first radio car pulled up in the same spot and the officers interviewed her curbside—right where the bad guys grabbed the kid. And it's been snowing off and on since. So I don't think we'll get anywhere with physical evidence.”

She looked around the room at the cops taking notes. “We're expecting a ransom demand. So we have a second command post under the direction of Criminal Conspiracy set up at the house. We've taken all marked police vehicles out of the area to minimize unwanted attention. The parents' number is unlisted, but these guys obviously were well-prepared.

“You'll be assigned to four six-man squads, each with a team leader from CCB. Our operating frequency is Tac Four. The assignment sheets
are up here on the desk. The first order of business is to canvas the neighborhood, see if anyone remembers a white guy and a black guy hanging around together. Ask the neighbors to keep it quiet.”

“What about the FBI?” asked a black cop. “We have to work with those fools?”

“We'll bring them in only if we have to,” said Slaughter. He spoke with a soft Tennessee accent. “We'll have to if this looks interstate.”

“I think we can pull our own weight,” added Easterly. The assembled officers murmured appreciatively.

“What about rewards?” asked another cop.

“The new guidelines require authorization from the city council,” Easterly said. “This is Sunday. We can't get that until tomorrow, at the earliest.”

Slaughter shook his head. “With all the racial crap going on with this council, I wouldn't count on it. Those people can't agree on the time of day. Besides, once we go to the council with this, the cat's out of the bag.”

“But a kid's life is at stake!” a cop protested.

“You know that and I know that,” said Slaughter. “But we're dealing with egos here. Political egos.” He looked pointedly over at the new chief, Mosely. “There's none worse.”

Mosely glared powerlessly back at him. Slaughter had also been a candidate for this job, the candidate favored by the troops. Besides, he was long past retirement eligibility, so he could say whatever he thought.

Easterly pointed to a tall stack of photos. “Pass out copies to everyone you contact.”

The briefing ended with that. Easterly's adjutant, a grizzled Detective Sergeant named Stanislaus Jablonski, handed out the team lists and pictures of the boy.

Kane and Bell were not on any list. The two men waited until the others filed out. Then, without speaking to each other, they approached Easterly.

“Excuse me, Inspector,” Bell said.

“Don't worry,” she said. “You're not working together.” She looked back and forth between them. “I've heard there's bad blood between you two. Put it aside, at least until we clean this up.”

“If we're not working together, what
are
we doing?” Kane asked.

“You're both on your own. Whatever you do is off the books.” She
looked back and forth between them. “That's how you usually work anyway, isn't it? A couple of lone wolves?”

“It's how I work,” Kane said.

“Okay, then. You get out among the white dirtbags. Bell, you work the blacks. I want you to cast very wide nets. Find out
anything
that's on the street telegraph. Make any deals you have to, short of a free ride on a murder. And you both report directly to me.”

Bell and Kane each picked up a stack of photos of the missing boy. Then they left the gym by separate doors.

When they were gone, Jablonski turned to Easterly. “Ain't love grand?”

“What's that all about, Stan? I've never heard the details.”

“It happened before you came on the department, when Kane was a rookie and Bell was three or four years on the job. They both worked Patrol in the Tenth Precinct. Kane was partnered with a redneck named Lucas, who was a known racist. Lucas blew away a black kid in an alley one night—his name was Colson or Caldwell, something like that. He was fourteen or fifteen years old. The kid supposedly pulled a gun, but word went around that Lucas planted it on the corpse.”

“And that Kane covered for him. Yeah, I vaguely remember hearing about it.”

“It was a big deal for awhile. Lucas was cleared by a Board of Review, primarily thanks to Kane. So there was a lot of bitterness on the part of the black officers. Kane was a kid, but he took a lot of heat.”

“Was Bell involved?”

“Not in the shooting. But he was heavily involved with the Afro-American Police Officers Association, as they called it back then. He was one of their organizers. He was pretty militant. That was the term they used in those days, militant. This AAPOA, they conducted their own investigation, came up with some stuff about Lucas' background that made him out to be a bigot, which of course he was. Bell and the other AAPOA officers tried to pressure the D.A. to take it to a grand jury, but he refused.”

“I remember reading about that, too, all the tension on the street.”

“Not just on the street, boss. A lot of the white coppers hated Bell, same as a lot of the black coppers hated Kane.” Jablonski paused, remembering. “It was a different department back then, Inspector. Women in this building didn't have it easy, either.”

”Oh, how I remember.” Easterly smiled sadly. “You don't need to remind me.”

“Everything's changed now. Bell saved a white copper's ass one night, and that gave the more reasonable white guys a more reasonable point of view. Most of the old-time rednecks are retired now, or dead, and Bell's got a great street rep. So that shit's all ancient history around here.”

“Except for Ralph Kane.”

Jablonski just shrugged. “Except for Ralph Kane.”

R
oberta Easterly washed her face in the women's room on the fifth floor of the ancient police station, examining her graying hair. She was pleased that she still had some of her good looks. But one thing was sure: her days posing as a call girl were long past.