The Squad Room

THE
SQUAD ROOM

ROBERT NIVAKOFF
AND JOHN CUTTER

THE
SQUAD ROOM

A NOVEL

SQUAD ROOM

Copyright © 2016 by Robert Nivakoff and John Cutter

FIRST EDITION

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Use of any copyrighted, trademarked, or brand names in this work of fiction does not imply endorsement of that brand
Hardcover ISBN: 9780825307911
Ebook ISBN: 9780825307201

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Interior design by Mark Karis
Cover Design by Michael Short

1

William Morrison pulled his black Crown Victoria out of his Levittown, Long Island driveway, and headed for the Long Island Expressway.

For the NYPD, Levittown is Copland; and for a cop, Bill Morrison had sort of made it. He wasn’t wealthy, but his home was comfortable: stone fireplace, central air, hardwood floors over the old-fashioned heating system built after World War II. It also came with a wife who drank Chardonnay by the box—a far less comfortable detail, but Morrison had learned to cope with it. He was an accomplished, awarded, decorated, and wounded member of the department, and an appreciated leader by the men and women who worked for him. His name at work was “Cap,” or “Boss”—“Captain” when things got formal. Specifically, he was the Major Crimes Captain, specializing in homicide, of the New York City Police Department’s Detective Bureau: a position he often called “a front-row seat to the greatest show on earth.”

This was a trip Morrison had made countless times since he’d graduated from the Academy at twenty-one. As he left his street behind him, he couldn’t remember a time when the trek wasn’t part of his daily ritual. There had been no life before this, really. Back then he’d lived in Queens, home of Archie Bunker and
All in the Family
, two-story row houses, the
New York Metropolitans—better known as the Mets—and two million other people struggling to make their way in “the city.” Back then the trip had been a different one: he’d take the Q42 bus to the E train at 179
^th
Street; then take the E to Manhattan, where he’d switch to the 6 train at 51
^st
Street; then take the 6 down to 23
^rd
and Park Avenue; then walk the rest of the way to the New York City Police Academy.

At six-foot-one and two hundred and fifty pounds, Morrison was an imposing man, but he still remembered the challenge of the Academy. In those days they’d had rigorous standards for everything: you had to be a certain height, had to have perfect eyesight, had to submit to background checks and four-year waiting lists. He also remembered how cruel the job had been, as he’d come on just after the layoffs. No one remembered the layoffs anymore, when the city had been completely in the dumps; when Times Square, 42
^nd
Street was called the Deuce, and prostitutes and pimps strolled up and down like they were on a catwalk. In those days a gun run—a police radio call—from Central, calling in a man with a gun at Rockaway and Livonia, would have led to a snappy retort from 73 Eddie that
everyone
on that corner had a gun.

As Morrison approached the Queens border, he sighed bleakly. Winter was well underway in New York, and the mixture of snow, sand, and typical highway litter piled alongside the roadway created an ominous grey backdrop to an already depressing day—a tone that certainly didn’t help with how he was already feeling. Like the bitter winter weather, the Captain’s battle with depression, alcohol, sleeplessness, and his failing marriage already felt as though it had gone on forever. He counted the days until March first—the day most cops fighting the Northeast weather, along with its crime, say they’ve made it through for the year. Even if it wasn’t exactly spring weather, it was close to St. Paddy’s Day, and that was enough to give most of them the necessary boost in morale. Yet that was a long way off.

It was Christmas day; and as usual, holiday plans for the men and women working under Bill Morrison would be brought to a halt. The holidays always seemed to bring out the bad in some people, which
meant that good people like the sergeants and detectives of the NYPD had to work harder. Yet despite the fact that they were responding to violence and crime, some of them were downright happy for the chance to get out of the house and away from their families for the day. The holidays always underscored divisions within families; and for cops, those divisions sometimes ran as deep as they did everywhere else. Morrision remembered the shirt he’d been given once, by a similarly estranged LAPD detective: above a picture of a dead body on the ground with several detectives standing around it was the motto, “Our Day Starts When Yours Ends.” It had somehow seemed to him the perfect summary of the everyday separation between the police and everyone else—the stark contrast in experience that made it so much easier for cops of any background to understand one another, than for even their closest kin to understand any of them. Most cops, as they say, aren’t white, black or any other race; they’re blue—and blue, as Morrison knew well, was a hard color for most others to relate to.

Now, as always on his morning ride, it was difficult for Bill Morrison to keep his mind on the job and off of his own familiar demons. His present marriage wasn’t the only one that rankled; these days he actually found it harder to keep from thinking about his first wife. Despite providing him with two children he loved, she’d been a vile, manipulating woman, and had taken him for every cent she could get. And to make matters worse, she’d left him for another guy on the job—the money was bad enough, but
that
had been degrading, and almost took him over the edge.

It had been years since, and the kids were grown and doing well, with families of their own whom Bill spoke to all the time. But if time had somewhat healed those wounds, it had only replaced them with others deeper still. His family was a big one—like most cops’ families, despite their difficulties with them—but Morrison’s was now smaller by one: a fact that no degree of therapy, psych services, employee assistance, alcohol, or drugs could erase from his mind.

It was my fault, it will always be my fault—

Morrison switched on the radio to clear his head. On a good day, when the stars aligned and the weather was clear, he was outside the Midtown Tunnel, fifty minutes from home, when the police radio was first able to come through. The radio was the life blood for the men and women on patrol, and for investigators it was a barometer for what lay ahead; listening to it, Morrison could instinctually tell, by the energy level of the transmissions to Central, how each job should be responded to. Today it was just a lot of radio chatter with the usual calls, and he lowered it. It had been a long time since radio calls—or anything else, for that matter—excited him.

Most days he listened to the traffic report to find the quickest way to the Midtown South Precinct, where invariably he’d struggle to find a parking spot. Yet today was not one of those days. Today he wasn’t on his way to the precinct, but to Sutton Place, an exclusive neighborhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was an area many considered to be the city’s Boardwalk and Park Place—the best of the best. Yet Captain Bill Morrison wasn’t visiting Sutton Place on a whim. Violence had shattered the elite utopia, and violence of a particularly shocking kind: a home invasion, involving the brutal rape and murder of a lone woman, whose body had been left disfigured at the scene.

In Morrison’s experience, most home invasions were drug robberies, with the victim tied to a chair and the whole family watching as hiding places were revealed. Home invasion homicides, accordingly, were typically drug robberies gone badly, with said victim refusing to give up the drugs or cash. From the moment the call came through on his cell phone at 0530, however, Morrison had known this one was different. It was possible that the victim here had known her assailants or could identify them, so they’d had to kill her, but Morrison suspected otherwise. Drug robberies, along with most other kinds of crime, were nonexistent in Sutton Place.

What had happened there?

2

When Captain Morrison had cleared the Midtown Tunnel, he got a call on his cell phone from Sergeant Andre Simmons. “This is no grounder, Cap,” Simmons told him, echoing Morrison’s own fondness for baseball euphemisms as a way of taking the edge off their work. “It’s way up there on the brutality meter. We have everyone going; Sergeants Rivera and McNamara are coming in with their squads. Crime Scene will be here for quite a while—there’s a lot of work to do.”

“Who from Crime Scene do we have there?” Morrison asked. “Williams and Kelly.”

Morrison had known both of these investigators for a while. Otis Williams, a 6’2” African-American guy, had been on the job almost as long as he had; the two of them used to chase sneakers together for the 34
^th
Precinct back in Fort Tryon Park. Morrison couldn’t imagine doing that himself these days, but the last time he’d seen Williams the guy looked like he could still run down a dealer in new Jordans. Kelly, a white Irish cop from Gerritsen Beach in Brooklyn, was a little younger, but no less capable than Williams when it came to processing a crime scene. The two had been partners since Kelly joined Crime Scene.

Given the diversity of the Crime Scene unit, Morrison was happy to
hear it was going to be these two on the job. You had the guys who were running away from dirty police work, for whom the unit’s two-days-on-four-days-off schedule was a bunt. Then you had the Williamses and Kellys of the department—guys who loved putting bad guys in jail, and had a passion for evidence collection. Morrison knew he wouldn’t have to direct them beyond pointing them to the scene; they considered it a badge of honor to collect evidence that would put a dirtbag behind bars, and would pull out all the stops vacuuming for fibers, bagging the deceased’s hands for potential DNA evidence, and documenting every inch of the scene before it was disturbed by others.

“All right, great. Thanks, Andre,” Morrison said. “I’m on my way—I just cleared the Midtown Tunnel, so I’m about ten minutes out.” He paused, an intuition crossing his mind. “Are you okay?”

“Well,” Simmons started, and took a deep breath. “Cap, I’ve worked a lot of cases with you, and everything’s moving here—we’ve started a canvas, searching for video, you know, we’re good. But this is really brutal. There’s serious bite marks, and it just gets worse from there.” He took another breath, then added quickly, “I’ll speak to you when you get here, okay? There’s so many bosses here it looks like a CompStat meeting.”

“All right, Andre. See you soon.”

Morrison hung up, vaguely perturbed. He hadn’t heard Simmons talk that way about a crime scene in five years, and it affected him to hear someone on his team so rattled. As the Major Crimes Captain, he had all the specialty squads at his disposal—Homicide, Special Victims (formerly known by the blunt moniker of Sex Crimes), and the robbery and gang squads—and every one of the men and women who worked for his team were near and dear to him. He probably—no; if he was going to admit it, he
positively
—spent more time with these people than anyone else. They were an eclectic bunch of misfits by some standards, but to Morrison they comprised one of the best investigative teams ever put together. It was an odd thing to admit sometimes: he lived with Kathleen and their daughter, but
this
was his real family.