The Squad Room (2 page)

Kathleen. He was emotionless these days when it came to her. He
couldn’t remember the last time he’d cared much about anything in his life outside of his work, and his wife was no exception to the rule. She was frumpy, drank to passing out, and went through more Ambien than a patient locked down in the psych unit at Bellevue. Most of all, she hated him—she really hated him. But then, he couldn’t entirely blame her for that.

He should never have talked her into letting their son take the police test. He remembered telling her that it was a legacy job—a job to be proud of keeping within the family. There were generations of Fitzgeralds on the force dating back to the 1800s, and they held their red heads high. Why shouldn’t the Morrisons enjoy a similar legacy? Besides, Bill Junior wasn’t going anywhere else in a hurry. He wasn’t much of a student, and didn’t have a trade he wanted to follow; if anything, he admired his father and what he did for a living. If he hadn’t wanted it, Morrison would never have forced him. Still, why hadn’t he pushed him to finish college and become a schoolteacher, a principal—anything but a cop?

God, did he miss that kid. Five years in, and it was still like yesterday. Bill Morrison could still hear the bagpipes from Our Lady of the Snows, where they’d held Billy’s funeral. Ten thousand cops at the service, from all over the country. Amazing Grace. Shield 21336, killed in the line of duty.

It will always be my fault.

When he’d graduated the academy, Bill Junior had needed to work in a place where there was still enough crime to keep him busy, and teach him the ropes, and his dad had made sure of it. Ninth Precinct, Lower East Side—Alphabet City, as it was known, for its lettered avenues. It was a dangerous area, the same area where officers Gregory Foster and Rocco Laurie, two former Marines put on a foot post there, had been gunned down by the Black Liberation Army in the ’70s. But that had been in the really dark times, when the city was filthy with crime and none of the cops wore bulletproof vests; when the population was under siege, and cops were being dropped by the dozens from the payroll to make ends meet.

Surely things would be different for Bill Morrison Junior.

They weren’t.

On a steamy July midnight tour, he and his partner stopped a car that had just blown a red light. What they didn’t know was that the two occupants of the car had just pulled an armed robbery. As they rolled up on them, the suspects jumped out of the car and opened fire on the officers, who rolled out of their car to return fire. One of the suspects was wounded, but William James Morrison Junior received multiple gunshot wounds to the face and was struck twice in his state-of-the-art bulletproof vest. He made it to Bellevue alive, but never made it out. The 45-caliber grease gun they’d shot him with was a fully automatic weapon, and he didn’t have a chance.

Morrison still felt the pain every day. If there really were five stages of grief, as they said, he didn’t know anything about the fifth. Kathleen didn’t make it any easier on him—they never spoke of their son’s death, but the hatred in her eyes spoke loud and clear. He couldn’t give up any more of his pension to divorce her, but they slept in separate rooms, and practically lived separate lives. Their daughter Nadia, sixteen now, and Morrison’s two other grown children were bright spots in their lives; but the rest of it was all just going through the motions. If they’d spoken, she might realize that he hated and blamed himself enough for both of them; that Billy’s death had been the end of his life too; that he still often wished, desperately wished, that it had been him who’d died that day.

But the words never came.

3

At the scene at Sutton Place, Morrison groaned inwardly as he stopped to acknowledge a number of high-ranking officers and commanders who had already arrived. High rents bring high ranks; and this being Sutton Place and not East New York, the armchair detectives were coming out of the woodwork. Thankfully, it was Christmas, so Morrison knew the worst of them wouldn’t arrive until the following day, when he knew he’d be able to deal with them. The job was not only a science, but an art: it required the ability to speak not only with suspects, but with the bosses who thought they were capable of running things—with whom you could only disagree when you knew you were right. Bill Morrison was one of its few artists, and always knew when he was right.

Getting past the brass, Morrison found Sergeants McNamara and Simmons waiting for him. The two men were typical of the new age of policing: smart, driven, and—above all else—loyal to the mission. They were as close as brothers; a striking fact, considering their respective backgrounds. Patrick McNamara had grown up in Woodside, a longtime Queens stronghold for Irish immigrants and their families. He was one of a long line of policemen, and though he was the first in his family to make it past patrolman, he’d known he would be a cop
from day one. Andre Simmons, on the other hand, a second-generation Haitian-American, had grown up poor in the Tilden projects in Brownsville, Brooklyn—a place where it was remarkable for a young black man to come out alive, to say nothing of coming out a cop. His parents, appreciating the new freedom and opportunities they enjoyed in America, had made sure to keep him on the straight and narrow, even to the extent of walking him to school every day as a teenager; and despite growing up tough—as he did by necessity—he’d also picked up a big smile and a perennially sunny disposition, along with a deep sense of compassion. When his father had suffered a heart attack in their apartment, he’d seen caring and reassurance intermingled with the commanding presence of the Housing Police officers who’d escorted his family to the hospital, and young Andre had decided that day to become a police officer himself.

Despite the difference in their lives before they joined the force, both Simmons and McNamara had worked extremely hard since then to get where they were now. Short of Detective Sergeant, Sergeant was the best policing job there was; and they had both put in countless hours of study and hard work to gain the necessary promotions. They’d each read the book of Penal Law and Criminal Procedure Law so many times, they probably dreamt about it, and had each been decorated numerous times for valor in the line of duty.

Simmons spoke up.

“Hey, Cap,” he said, and got right down to business. “Patrol picked up one guy a few blocks away, but I don’t think he’s even close to being a suspect.”

“What’d they pick him up for?”

“Possession of drugs—he’ll be going through the system anyway. I told the detectives to go slow with him, but I’m just not getting the feeling he’s our guy.” He leaned in confidentially. “Can you please just make sure to keep the Coke Brothers away from him during his interview?”

Morrison smiled. The request was typical Simmons—diplomatic
and polite. Others, he knew, might have used far more direct language. The “Coke Brothers” were detectives Mike Marchioni and Leo Kasak, who were still back at the house—almost certainly cooped up in their private office. Most detectives shared one common office area, commonly known as the squad room, but Marchioni and Kasak had their own office within the squad room, complete with a perennially closed door and two desks facing one another, so they could each speak to the only person—besides Morrison himself—who mattered. Their spectacular aloofness had been cause for quite a bit of speculation among the squad, and not all of it friendly. Everyone was loyal to the Captain, but these two were more than loyal; there was something almost fanatical about it, and to many of the others it was just plain insulting. Even in situations where talk was necessary, they’d withhold most of it for Morrison and each other, chain of command be damned. To say they were detectives of the old school would be putting it mildly. They were about as unorthodox as they came, and not always acceptably so. A lot of the young cops didn’t know it, but their nickname came from an interview they’d held with a particularly tight-lipped suspect back in the day, in which Marchioni had finally elicited a confession from the guy by pulling his head back by the hair and waterboarding him a few times with a shaken-up bottle of Coca-Cola.

“All right, all right, I’ll keep ’em busy,” Morrison laughed. “We wouldn’t want any complaints.”

“Thanks, Cap. I know you have a soft spot for the old-schoolers.”

Morrison watched thoughtfully as Simmons got back to work. Simmons was right; he did have a soft spot for cops of the Coke boys’ pattern. But unlike many of the young cops who looked up to them, he didn’t appreciate them for their toughness, but for their integrity. Below their grandstanding, macho exteriors, Kasak and Marchioni had the hearts of true defenders of the public good. All too many cops nowadays, of the “collars for dollars” mindset, were happy to spend days processing their arrests, raking in the overtime hours while their shoplifters squirmed in a holding cell with rapists and murderers. The
Coke boys, by contrast, got that part of their job over with as soon as they could; and when it couldn’t be done quickly, they more often than not gave the credit for their arrest to somebody else in order to get back out on the streets. Theirs was the thrill of the chase; and they pursued it tirelessly.

Still, Morrison thought with a smile, it was a damn good thing he had cooler-headed cops like Simmons on his force to balance them out.

Once the Crime Scene Unit had finished collecting their evidence, it was Captain Morrison and his team’s turn to go through the scene in greater detail. The processing of this scene was going to take more time than usual; but Morrison sensed that removing the carpet for forensic analysis would be worth it. He knew a crime like this, with a socialite victim in a neighborhood like Sutton Place, would bring tremendous scrutiny from every angle, and it wouldn’t do to be caught having left any stone unturned.

All of the major media outlets had reporters assigned to police headquarters at One Police Plaza—otherwise known as the Puzzle Palace—so Morrison was quick to instruct all of his people to keep the lid tight on this case. Anyone outside their group was not to be spoken to—and that included other police offices. News traveled fast, but none faster than whispers in the hallways at 1PP; and an unfortunate reality of policing in the modern era was that even a notification to the Chief of Detectives’ office could quickly lead to an out-of-control press leak.

“So what do we tell Arndt when he gets here?” Sergeant McNamara asked.

Morrison laughed out loud.

“Sergeant,” he said, “I doubt you have anything to worry about. There’s no way our illustrious Chief of Detectives is coming out on Christmas Day—not unless the Commissioner himself lights a fire under his ass. But to take your question seriously,” he added, “if by chance Arndt
does
show up, I don’t want you or anyone on our team telling him
anything
. Just call me. Got it?”

McNamara nodded. Morrison dismissed him back to work, chuckling again. There was no way
that
phone call would be coming through today.

Just then he saw Sergeant Rivera walking in the door, and grabbed him. Frankie Rivera was a distinguished Vietnam vet and longtime commanding officer of the Homicide squad, and was Morrison’s go-to guy to put in charge of touchy situations like this. He was a very funny man, despite a troubled interior that came out in his war stories when he’d had a few too many vodkas, and on the job, he was a perfectionist among perfectionists. He was a born cop—close to mandatory retirement, and dreading the day—and his years of experience had taught him to leave nothing to chance. Under his control, there would be no questions about chain of custody, or sloppy reporting; everything would be well organized and forensically correct.

Leaving Rivera to catch up with the others, Morrison next called back to Homicide, to speak with Kasak and Marchioni. Kasak picked up, a slightly deeper tone the only aspect that discriminated his voice from his partner’s.

“What’s happening, Cap?”

“Kasak,” Morrison said, “I need you guys to take over a patrol arrest related to this Sutton Place incident. He’s a homeless guy they picked up in the area, working Sutton Place instead of one of the train stations—probably just figured the pickings were better here.”

“Can’t say I blame him,” said Kasak mildly. “Though if I were him, I’d get someplace warmer—I understand Fort Lauderdale has one of the largest homeless populations in the country this time of year.”

Morrison cut the small talk. “Listen, this is serious. I don’t want you fluffing this off, or stopping at the deli before you talk to this guy. Simmons doesn’t think the guy has anything to do with what’s happened here, and we need to move quick to make sure nobody starts talking like they’ve caught John Dillinger. I’ll square it with the desk lieutenant that you guys are taking over from patrol.”

“All right, Cap, we’re on it.”

Morrison hung up, and turned to see Sergeant Rivera regarding him with anxiety written across his handsome Puerto Rican features.

“Aw man, don’t tell me the Coke boys are already on their way in,” Rivera said. “It’s too early for me to deal with those two prima donnas.”

Morrison held back a smile. Even given how often that term was used for detectives—just the price you paid for not wearing a clip-on tie to work—Kasak and Marchioni got it the most.

“Frankie, don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’m giving them strict orders, and they’ll follow them.”

At the word “orders,” Rivera visibly relaxed. The Coke Brothers were a handful, but no one who worked for Bill Morrison ever disobeyed him.

“All right, all right, you know what I want to hear,” he said.

When the scene was pretty much done, Morrison got ready to head out. On the way out he stopped to talk to the cops on the scene, wishing them all a Merry Christmas and addressing them by name. He’d always had a gift for remembering names; it was one of the qualities that made him a cops’ cop. Everyone liked to be remembered, from the janitor to the precinct commander, but a personal connection with their superior officer made cops want to walk through fire for him.