The Big Fear (5 page)

Mitchell went on. “Let’s talk about what happened after the shooting.” But even Mulino knew he was safe on this part. After the shooting, he had done everything as close to proper as it gets. He had called right away for the backup and the medic. He hadn’t touched anything. He was supposed to have tried CPR, but it wouldn’t have mattered. The helicopter took twelve minutes to get there and Rowson was probably dead within three.

Soon the interview was over and they were both standing. Mitchell reached out and shook Mulino’s hand. Mulino wondered if that was a good sign, given that he’d turned him down before they started. Then Mitchell turned back to the cardboard hallway and was already gone. Andropovic stood up, already thinking of his next case, and patted Mulino on the back.

“You did great. It’s probably all over.”

Another lie. Mulino knew the guy was there to protect him, but it made him feel dirty just to have representation. Having a lawyer felt like an admission that he’d done something wrong.

Leonard Mitchell had done his job, Mulino supposed. He was supposed to ask. He had been told the color of the day a thousand times in his career and barely remembered it when he did. He did begin to wonder about the gun though. He saw it in the detective’s hand. The thing was, though, there was no moment where the crime scene guy lifted it up and showed the whole crowd and put it in the bag. They do that on a street shooting because by that time there are reporters present. But everyone on the boat had been PD, except for the six crew members who had woken up, claiming to have slept through the whole thing. It gnawed at Mulino a little. Maybe the gun had slid off the boat somehow. Maybe it was going to show up in the report tomorrow and the whole thing would be over. Maybe, he worried, his mind was playing tricks on him, and he thought he remembered something that wasn’t there. Or maybe something else.

The something else he didn’t want to think about. Maybe some cop had heard just enough about Mulino from back in the day. A story about Ebbets Field and the trial room and maybe this detective was due a little payback. Not that any of them knew the whole story. Just the bits and pieces that get passed down as warnings in locker rooms and grimy hallways. Enough, though, to maybe take action. To think it would be a good idea to make Mulino squirm. They didn’t know how much he had squirmed back then. Or maybe something worse. Maybe it wasn’t some line officer on the ship kicking the gun overboard. Maybe someone higher up was thinking about Mulino too. Maybe there was a reason he was called that night after all. Mulino hurried out of the elevator and into the heat. He had someone to talk to.

CHAPTER SEVEN

PAPER

Leonard slouched by the nautical window and stared past the pigeon shit onto the West Side Highway. He’d taken over Davenport’s office because what the hell, he was in charge now. At least until they threw him out. And if he didn’t at least stake a claim to the corner office, then he’d be sending a signal that even
he
didn’t think that he belonged there. And if he brought this one in, maybe he could stay.

More information on the shooting would dribble onto his computer for the rest of the day. Memos from the Crime Scene Unit, roll calls from the Harbor Patrol, scans of memo books from patrol officers and daily activity reports from detectives, and every scrap of paper filled out by every cop that had stepped foot anywhere near the boat that night. The NYPD ran the full technological gamut. There were the elite security units with retinal scanners, the high-end narcotics squads with fifty-foot cranes mounted with ultraviolet cameras to look into your apartment, and the counterterrorism units with goodies galore. The evidence guys are fully capable of scouring a ship in the middle of the night and sending you a bundled e-mail with eighty-seven photographs to look at the next morning. But in its daily plodding heart, the NYPD is a pen-to-paper operation. There are dozens of carbon paper forms that haven’t been updated yet, so every precinct has to keep a typewriter on hand to fill them out. Personnel files are printed on immense rolls of paper, complete with hole-punched perforated edges clinging to a spool as the machine chirps away. The entry-level kid at most businesses keeps a digital calendar, but cops are stuck with memo books where they are supposed to ballpoint everything they do, from collaring a murderer to helping someone down a flight of subway stairs. Mostly the memo books are filled up with the phone numbers of girls who like a guy in uniform. Aided cards, stop-and-frisk forms, use-of-force reports, warrant execution reports: a cop has to write out every one by hand. So even though Leonard would get every piece of digital data sometime today, his file wouldn’t be nearly complete.

In a week or two, the actual paper would come in. Leonard could smell the dusty residue of Ms. Mortiz’s third grade class whenever he opened a manila envelope from a local precinct. You need the hard copy. Even the pages that they scanned and sent ahead were all only one-sided. Whenever a cop needs to know something but doesn’t want someone to look at it later, he folds over a page of his memo book and jots it down on the flyleaf.

He had done the interview too soon, he thought. He didn’t know enough. Mulino had been almost too bright and too eager. Showing up in the uniform when most detectives will roll into DIMAC in their sweatshirts. The detective had been smiling, trying to help, until Andropovic used his stupid tapping-on-the-knee stunt again. Leonard made a note to report that to the union.

Mulino hadn’t looked like Leonard had expected either. Skeptical dark eyes on an otherwise broad sweet face, Mulino looked almost too nice to be a lifelong cop. He had shot another detective, he was answering for it at DIMAC, and he hadn’t hardened into the traditional scowl, even now. The skin around the corners of his eyes was still soft and his hair had only a hint of gray. The guy had spent most of the interview almost smiling.

And the story had sounded good enough. But the story always sounds good the first time. Before you’ve gone back over it and checked against the logs and the other guy’s memo book and the security video if you can get it. It would all turn on whether the part about the gun panned out. If a gun turned up, Leonard wasn’t going to bask in City Hall’s glow after all. But if there was no gun, it wouldn’t matter what Mulino said.

And it still didn’t make sense that Mulino was the guy who got this call. Plenty of detectives awake at one in the morning, regular day off or no. And it wasn’t like Mulino was some special firecracker, the guy you absolutely need to have when you’re stomping around a container ship.

Maybe he would find some answers in the digital production. The least he could do was to start looking. The preliminary personnel records had shown that Rowson had a tussle with Internal Affairs about eighteen months ago. Now the whole thing was spelled out. A summary investigation for improper disposal of evidence—a euphemism for pocketing the profits of someone you busted. Rowson had taken down a small-time fencer of stolen jewelry—stuff that discreet household help tries to sell through private channels because it would attract attention at a pawnshop. The detective had been accused of keeping a couple of pairs of earrings for himself. They had been in his desk, and he’d claimed the whole thing was an accident. He hadn’t sold them, so they couldn’t bust him for it. The report had hinted that maybe he had been planning on giving them to his wife for their anniversary. They hadn’t even been real diamonds, but Brian Rowson probably didn’t know that. The investigation had been closed as unsubstantiated, with no trip to the trial room. Instead, Rowson had been transferred to the Harbor Patrol. Somewhere where he couldn’t get into any more trouble. From then until the day he was shot he had a crisp and uneventful history.

Nearly getting busted for stealing a pair of earrings, though, is no reason to get killed. And it wouldn’t explain why he had been on the boat to begin with. Leonard set down the personnel file and tracked through the roll call. The original would be a thick printout from an antique computer, complete with dot-matrix rendering and a ribbon of holes on the side to hold the paper to the printer’s knotty spool. The scan was almost illegible. Every day each precinct churns out this record of who is partnered with whom, which sector they plan to patrol, which car they will do it in, all capped off with the serial numbers of their guns. Harbor Patrol doesn’t use cars much, but officers are still divvied up with partners, and as often as not cruise assigned swatches of the waterways.

Nearly every day for the last month, Leonard saw as he scrolled through the roll call, Detective Rowson had been paired with the same cop: Officer Joey Del Rio. They had been all over the city: scouting the East River looking for illegal dumping, Coney Island where a drunk might just slip and drown, and the Bronx side of the Hudson where now and again someone would still leave a body. Most of the other officers would trade partners every few days, but Rowson was paired with Joey Del Rio every day that he wasn’t assigned to be the sergeant’s driver.

The name of the sergeant caught Leonard’s attention as well. Sparks. Of course. It was the sergeant who had ferried Mulino out to the boat. Once or twice a month, Rowson was assigned to drive Sparks. A routine duty for a junior cop, driving the sergeant around. But Rowson wasn’t a junior cop any more. It seemed that even though Rowson got to keep his detective’s badge, after his IAB investigation he was back to being a patrol officer in everything but title. On the day he was killed, Brian Rowson was RDO—on his Regular Day Off. So was Officer Del Rio.

Leonard checked the assignment for Rowson’s weapon. It was a standard-issue nine millimeter. Just what Mulino said he saw, the same gun that almost every cop in the city carries. If Rowson had been out on that boat without his weapon, the gun would be at his house or at his precinct. Doing a search of a precinct locker requires a field visit, and for DIMAC to do a field visit requires NYPD approval. You get your approval from the wrong lieutenant and whatever you’re looking for is gone when you show up.

The full evidence report hadn’t come through yet, but there were ballistics on Mulino’s weapon and effects at least. The techs on board had snapped and bagged the shell, Mulino’s flashlight, the small bit of flesh that ended up on the deck of the boat. The bullet itself had probably landed in the ocean after. Little chance that they’d recover it. Not that it mattered; there was no need to run the ballistics to see who had done the shooting.

Mulino’s gun was preserved, along with the results of his breathalyzer (he had passed). But there was no photograph of a second gun. Maybe it would show up later today with the full evidence list. Maybe some tech forgot to take a picture of it. But given the dozens of photographs of the scene and the minutiae that had been recovered, Leonard kind of doubted it. He was left with a statement by a detective that he had seen a gun. Not just the shine and the flash of it, not so he could maybe have made a mistake. Mulino said that he had walked up to the body and seen the gun by the dead man’s hand. But the photographs from the boat gave no clue that a gun had ever been there.

Except that wasn’t true exactly. Leonard scrolled to the end of the file. The pictures of the crime he didn’t have any jurisdiction to investigate. The dead sailor that Mulino had stumbled across before he shot Rowson. The kid’s head was a mangled mess. A fair chunk had been scooped out from the left temple, but both eyes were still open and the lips were parted as if about to speak. The uniform was tidy and he was lying straight on his back. He may or may not have been shot with a nine millimeter, but he was shot with something. Only one bullet was gone from Mulino’s gun. So if Rowson hadn’t killed the crew member, or if he hadn’t been armed at all, then someone else had been out on that deck. The rest of the skeleton crew—only seven men on the whole boat—had all been below deck and had slept through the whole thing, if you could believe them. It’s not as though Leonard would ever get access to them. They were for the NYPD to interview now. If he couldn’t prove that it was related to Mulino shooting Detective Rowson, he couldn’t force anyone to talk to him.

Mulino had been called after midnight, he’d said. He was sent out with a Harbor Patrol sergeant he’d never met and he’d never been told the color of the day. He received no briefing. He didn’t know what he was looking for. Or who. Anything could have been happening on that boat.

The detective had had no idea what he was getting into out there.

Leonard stood away from his computer and surveyed the dumpy office. It wasn’t much, but he was in charge now. He had a stable of sixty-five investigators at his disposal, but most of them were admittedly burnouts or kids ducking out from work early to work on screenplays or civil service lifers watching their own pensions. Even the best of them were spending two years getting their feet wet before heading off to law schools and corporate towers and bundles of money to assuage the guilt. They didn’t know yet that the quest for truth is thick with contradiction. That sometimes you have to bully someone to catch a brute, to lie to someone so he’ll confess to being a liar. Even the smart kids could be easily outmaneuvered by a diligent corrupt official or a clever union lawyer. In a few years, they would understand. But he couldn’t trust them now.

For two years at DIMAC he had done all of Christine Davenport’s heavy lifting. He had pored through the padded hours of the minions of the Consumer Affairs Department and the fake sick days of sanitation officers. He had watched seventeen hours of video footage to see which firefighter had looted a trove of personal possessions. He had drafted her speeches and balanced her budgets. Now he was in charge, but he had no deputy as reliable as himself. His job would be pretty much the same as it had been before.

Except that he would be the target if something went wrong. If the investigation failed, his head would roll. And if Mulino felt cornered, he would feel that Leonard was the one cornering him.

Maybe no gun would show up. If Mulino was making up the part about the gun, then this was a cop who had shot an unarmed man in cold blood. Who could be facing the loss of his job, his pension, worse. Leonard shrugged it off. The cops never take revenge on you. Not personally. That’s the first thing they tell you when they train you at DIMAC. Never worry that the cops will actually come after you. Because if you do, you will be paralyzed with fear.

But there is no harm in seeking a little protection. He closed his door, picked up the phone, and called City Hall. Even with Davenport quitting so suddenly, Leonard still had a friend or two left. He had paid out enough favors as the top lieutenant in a couple of different agencies. There are always children of friends looking for jobs, tickets to minor-league baseball games to distribute, introductions to make. All of it the completely-above-board butter that feeds any big organization. And the City of New York is a very big organization.

A soft, bored lifer answered the phone. You have to be pretty high up in the city before they give you someone to pick it up for you. “Deputy Mayor Victor Ells’s office.”

“Is he in? It’s Leonard Mitchell at DIMAC.”

“Let me check.”

The Deputy Mayor for Legal Matters had been brought into the new regime from the US Attorney’s office and had a reputation as a corruption fighter himself. He had led the rackets division in the Southern District, prosecuting a crime family that had controlled every street repair project in Manhattan. Not content to lock up mobsters, he had started going after the executive staff of the Department of Transportation, bagging the deputy commissioner there on fraud and perjury charges. After the election, the new mayor had brought him on board—maybe because he trusted him or maybe because he wanted to pluck him away from a job where he could throw the mayor’s cronies in jail. Leonard had always liked him; he was the only person at City Hall he could speak to without getting the impression that he was being scolded for something.