The Squad Room (31 page)

The table was eerily quiet. Everyone remained completely focused on Morrison, waiting to hear the name spoken. Under the intensity of their gaze, he felt the full weight of what he had to tell them.

“I admit, this is very difficult for me,” he continued at length. “I’ve always considered the police to be the good guys, as you all do, and given the benefit of the doubt to our brotherhood at every opportunity. The fact that we’re all even here should demonstrate my conviction that our information is reliable. I’m sick to my core with what I have to tell you, but it needs to be said: Louis Galipoli is our copycat.”

The silence deepened into shock. Despite the universal dislike of the new detective, no one could believe—could even
want
to believe—that
one of their own could commit the atrocities they’d seen. Kasak and Marchioni stared at Morrison, confounded; they knew he wouldn’t bring up such a thing lightly.

“Jesus,” Kasak said finally. “I always knew the guy was a jerkoff, and no one could stand his egotistical attitude, but to think he’s a rapist and a murderer—man, that’s pretty hard to deal with.”

Bill Morrison raised his hands to quiet the murmur of agreement that ran around the table. “I know,” he said. “Believe me, I know. I’ve really been struggling with this myself. And once you hear what some of us already know, you can make up your own minds as to whether it’s the right conclusion or not. And I want to stress again that at that point, you can bow out if you want to.”

Next he had the other members of the squad tell the group what they’d discovered over the past few days. Sergeant Rivera started off with the information they’d collected from the military personnel they’d spoken to. He recounted Gonzalez’s and Dyer’s allegations of attempted rape and murder, pointing especially to the connection between Galipoli’s slapping and punching his intended Army victim in the face, and the severe facial bruising they’d found on their copycat victims. He also mentioned, to the horror of the team, Captain Dyer’s suspicion that Galipoli had killed his former lieutenant to cover up his wrongdoings.

This information was followed by the discovery from the car. Francisco Garriga explained what he’d found inside the gym bag, and each item described raised the pitch of anger around the table. When he mentioned the last item, the sap gloves, Kasak and Marchioni leaned back from the table in disgust.

“I don’t know about any of you,” Mike Marchioni blurted out furiously, “but I’m in. Whatever you want us to do, Captain—I’m in. And I know I speak for Leo and myself when I say, give us the word, and we will fuck this guy up. Beating on women—! This piece of shit isn’t a man, he’s a monster, and he needs to be stopped.”

“Absolutely,” Kasak agreed. “Give us ten minutes alone with him!
No backing out here, Cap.”

Around the table his sentiment was echoed to a man. Everyone felt the same; no one was backing out of the assignment, no matter what it was. Morrison was touched, but hardly surprised; good cops can never stand bad ones. There was no “blue wall of silence” or tolerance for a cop who could do such a thing; a cop who crossed that line was no more than a disgrace to the job.

Again Morrison raised his hands to quiet the table.

“Now you all know how I’ve felt, these past few days,” he said. “It’s a hard and unusual position to be in, to wish your professional instincts were incorrect, and have them proven right anyway. But there’s still some room for error here; and we can’t act until we’re a hundred percent certain that Galipoli’s the copycat. As compelling as the evidence is, we need to be patient and put together a solid case against him, before we charge out of here to grab him. That’s where the plan comes into play.”

Rivera was waiting for this. “Okay, Cap,” he said. “What’s the plan?”

“You may have wondered why Tina and Alex aren’t with us this evening,” Morrison said, to a ripple of nods around the table. “They’re currently conducting surveillance on Galipoli. I’ve discussed my plan thoroughly with them already, and they’re in full agreement with it. But they’re going to need your help to make it work.

“So far, we’ve been lucky, and Galipoli’s been tied up in court processing the Rutherford/Anderson case,” he continued. “Karma’s a bitch: his hijacking of the arresting-officer commendation has actually worked in our favor. As of an hour ago, he’s been at home; he’s scheduled to come into the precinct tomorrow morning for regular duty.”

“Excuse me, but what about the radio car?” O’Dell asked. “Won’t he be suspicious if he comes back and doesn’t find his bag there?”

“We’ve returned the bag, with all its contents except the panties and shorts,” Morrison explained. “Those are with the Medical Examiner’s Office; hopefully he won’t notice they’re missing until too late.

“Now, we’re going to be playing a dangerous game of spider and fly, boys,” he went on, “and we can’t risk him catching onto us until
we’ve got him. Based on everything we know about him, Galipoli has used his supposed charm on the women he’s attacked; tomorrow we’re going to turn the tables on him. Tina Koreski’s going to be our spider. Before you ask, she’s the one who came up with the idea; I was hesitant to allow it, but she wants to catch him as badly as any of you do, and her thinking is sound. Galipoli’s been after her since he met her on the taskforce: asking her out, telling her it’d be their little secret, et cetera. If he asks tomorrow when he comes back, as we have reason to think he will, she’s going to say yes.

“We think his insistence about it being kept secret from the squad goes further than the usual professional reasons. To put it mildly, we think he has plans for Tina beyond the typical first date. Now I want to stress this: if we’re right, and he is our copycat killer, Tina is going to be in serious
danger the whole time she’s with him
. This means we all need to be on point in keeping her safe. Some of you may know she was let down before; that cannot, that
will
not, happen again. She’s asked that Leo and Mike be her primary backup team.”

The Coke brothers looked surprised.

“She asked for us specifically?” Kasak asked.

“It was her one condition for doing this,” Morrison said.

Kasak and Marchioni nodded. Despite the gravity of the situation, they were unable to keep their pride from showing through.

“We won’t let anything happen to her, Cap,” Marchioni said. “We swear it on our lives.”

“I know you won’t,” Morrison said. “That’s why I agreed to any of this. Now, everyone else will also be out on the street during this operation—
except
Alex Medveded. After his interview of the one guy in Boston, Galipoli has been talking to him more and more: telling him how much he admired his work, how well he handled all the gory details, and so forth. Alex has been playing along with him ever since, and he believes he may have Galipoli suspecting that he, too, is into the shit those psychos did.”

There was a murmur of disbelief around the table.

“Look, Medveded’s great, no doubt about it,” Simmons said, “but this is pushing it for me.”

“I agree,” Rivera said. “You have to be a complete idiot to talk to the cops, if you really committed a crime.”

“An idiot, or an egomaniac,” Bill Morrison returned. “You can’t underestimate the lengths a person like this will go to for their ego, Frankie. Anyone they can get to appreciate how smart they are, and how they fooled the stupid cops for so long—they’ll do it. Think about the worst serial killers: so many of them ended up talking, for that reason alone. Galipoli might not be dumb, but he’s definitely got an ego, and in all likelihood he’s hankering for some recognition.”

There was a general assent to this last; if there was anything Galipoli had in spades, it was ego. Morrison went on.

“All right, now, what do we know about the two victims in the copycat case? They both were killed in their own apartments. So we figure, if Galipoli does ask Tina out, and he is trying to push things, he’ll want to get them back to her place at some point during the evening. Accordingly, Sergeant McNamara’s had a friend in TARU wire up Tina’s apartment for both audio and video. She’ll also be wearing a kel, starting in the morning, to capture any conversation between her and Galipoli. Remember, every conversation she has that day will be recorded for evidence purposes—so don’t say anything stupid.”

The tension at the table finally broke a little as the others laughed.

“Yeah,” Simmons said, “maybe that means Garriga will let up for a day on his Jack Nicholson impersonation from
A Few Good Men
—‘You want me on that wall! You need me on that wall!’”

The group laughed out loud as Garriga blushed. Once a Marine, always a Marine, he’d been known to stand on a desk and recite the entire scene in its entirety, playing both roles.

Morrison, smiling, quieted them down once more. “Okay, people,” he said, “here’s how it’s going to go for the rest of you. Rivera and O’Dell, you guys are backup team number two. I want you on Galipoli, as soon as he leaves the precinct. McNamara and Garriga, you’re team
three, with ears on the kel. Simmons, you’re with me for team four. Remember, we don’t know what’s going to happen—we could all be wrong, and just spend a quiet night listening to them having dinner together. But I strongly doubt it.

“The most important thing, obviously, is Tina’s safety. I can’t say this enough:
we can’t lose her.
If they end up back at her apartment, the second we have enough to lock him in, we go through the door. I’ll have the ram with me. Everyone is to wear a vest—Kasak, Marchioni, that means you—and bring flashlights as well. We know there’ll be at least two guns in the house if they go there, and if he’s capable of shooting his army lieutenant in cold blood, don’t think he won’t shoot us in the heat of the moment. Tina has a safety word in case things are getting too hairy and she wants to pull the plug early—in which case, presuming it’s outside, Sergeant Simmons will approach them as though he’d just seen them by chance, so as to not give the operation away. The code word is
pumpernickel.”

O’Dell laughed. “I thought a safe word was supposed to be something easy to slip in!” he said. “What’s she going to say—
I love the color of your eyes, they’re just the shade of pumpernickel?”

The rest of the table joined in his laughter. Yet there was a shade of nervousness underlying it, now that they knew the plan. Despite their strategy’s simplicity, they all knew how messy things could get either way. If Galipoli was the copycat, anything going otherwise than as planned could give him the opportunity to kill again. If, on the other hand, he wasn’t the copycat, and found out he was suspected, a world of shit could fall on all of them. Both scenarios were nightmarish. Still, the job had to be done.

“All right,” Morrison said, rising. “I’m going to speak to a waiter; they’ve been kind enough to leave us to our business so far, but we should eat while we’re here. We’re going to need to be rested and ready tomorrow. If Tina gives me the green light, we all know what we’re doing tomorrow night.

“Let me just add,” he concluded, “that I truly appreciate all of you
standing with me on this one. I know this could mean all of your careers if it goes wrong, as it could mean mine. Thank you. No matter what happens, I’m proud to stand beside all of you.”

“We’re with you, Cap, whatever happens,” said Rivera. “Now go light on the bread, will you? I don’t like to feel too heavy when I’m running a sting on one of my serial-killer coworkers.”

The others laughed as Morrison went off in search of the waiter.

35

The next morning, Bill Morrison was at his desk before six.

As usual, Sergeant Rivera was the next one in, not counting Medveded. Morrison had wanted Medveded and Koreski especially fresh for today, so he’d had Garriga and O’Dell relieve them on surveillance the night before; but typical for Medveded, he was already in the office this morning, reviewing the notes he’d been making since the arrests in Boston on his conversations with Galipoli.

Morrison watched Medveded through his office window.
The chess master at work,
he thought. Not even six in the morning and the guy was already mentally sizing up his opponent. Morrison smiled to himself. He knew he’d made the right call on that one, at least.

Tina Koreski showed up next, having spent the last hour getting set up with the kel. McNamara was already waiting outside in a surveillance van, ready to capture her every word. She’d made sure to dress normally, but Morrison’s practiced eye noticed an extra button open on her shirt, showing just a little more cleavage than usual.

Morrison suppressed his many second thoughts about the operation, knowing they needed a smoking gun to ensure their case against Galipoli couldn’t go up in smoke. The man himself would probably stroll in between eight and nine; he was never one to be early, but never
late enough to get him any grief over it. That gave Morrison a couple of hours to review his own notes and get his thoughts in order. If Galipoli was the copycat, it would certainly cause some trouble with the other two arrests; thankfully he hadn’t actually been involved in the case in any tangible way—his only connection had been through his friend, Chief Arndt—so it might be possible to prepare for that contingency, too. In any event, Morrison hoped the solution he’d prepared would work.

As expected, Louis Galipoli wandered in around eight-forty. Morrison watched him come in, with a heightened sense of disgust at the man’s arrogance. It was unfortunate that other heads would likely roll if he turned out to be their copycat—particularly that of his initial investigator, who’d likely just been in the wrong place at the wrong time—but Morrison certainly wouldn’t mind seeing Chief Arndt take some serious heat for this one. It had been on his say-so alone that the pretentious asshole had been put here in the first place, behind which decision lives may have been lost. He turned as Galipoli strutted by, to conceal his disdain.

Galipoli, for his part, had other things to look at. Almost immediately upon his arrival, he had his eyes on Tina Koreski. He had definitely noticed the extra button; you could almost see his face light up like he’d hit the jackpot.