The Squad Room (29 page)

“Well, don’t let him put you off,” O’Dell said. “If we can get any of this verified, he won’t be there for long.”

“Let’s hope not,” Gonzalez laughed. “He’s a dangerous customer to trust with law and order, that’s for sure. I mean, the thought of him earning any sort of
medal
—it’s just insane! And Lyons signing off on it—! That sounds like forgery to me; forgery, or some kind of enormous mix-up. I mean, the guy had absolutely no team mentality, no thought for anyone else, no—”

“Same Galipoli, all right,” Rivera sighed. “If you gentlemen will excuse me a moment, I’ve got a phone call to make. I have a feeling the Captain will be interested in hearing this.”

32

Captain Morrison had a restless night’s sleep.

The events of the past several days—culminating in Sergeant Gonzalez’s information about Galipoli—were really getting to him; and he was struggling for the peace to sleep for one more hour before the squad room started to buzz again.

The door to the bunkroom opened. Someone was standing in the doorway, backlit and indistinct. Morrison sat up in his bunk.

“I hope you have a good reason to barge in here, whoever it is,” he said.

McNamara’s voice drifted across in an urgent whisper. “Sorry, Cap—it’s me, Pat, and yes, it is important.”

“Christ, is it another homicide?” Morrison asked, his heart racing.

“No, Cap,” McNamara said. “It may be worse than that. Can you get dressed? We need to talk out of the office. I’ll wait for you out front.” And turning into the light, he was gone.

Morrison scrambled to get dressed, wondering as he did what could be going on that Pat McNamara couldn’t even talk about here. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good.
So much for another hour of sleep,
he thought.

When Morrison exited the front door of the precinct, McNamara was sitting out front in an unmarked car with the motor running. Morrison saw Sergeant Simmons sitting in the backseat. Somehow the sight made him more anxious than before. He jumped into the front passenger seat, and they peeled away from the curb as if they were heading to a 10-13.

“Pat, tell me—what the fuck is going on?” Morrison asked.

“Just give me a few minutes to park, Cap,” McNamara said, “and we’ll show you what this is all about.”

Morrison had never seen his sergeants act like this before, so he quelled his curiosity a moment and went with it. At this time of the morning there was little traffic, and after a quick drive they’d reached the Westside Highway and West 34
^th
Street. They pulled into a quiet parking lot close to the water. For an instant it flashed through Morrison’s mind that if they were gangsters, this was when the guy in the backseat would put an icepick in the back of his head. Thankfully, he knew that wasn’t the case; though from the others’ demeanor, what he was about to hear seemed as though it might make that scenario seem less painful.

Once they’d parked, McNamara turned to him.

“It’s in the trunk,” he said resignedly. “Let’s take a look, shall we?”

Morrison realized he was now completely in the blind. What the hell could be in the trunk of the car that had these two sergeants so distressed?

When they were all standing behind the vehicle, McNamara looked one way, then another, then swiftly opened the trunk. There, in the otherwise empty trunk, sat a small black knapsack. Sergeant Simmons reached in, pulled it towards the edge, and opened the zipper to expose its contents.

Morrison’s eyes grew wide as he saw it.

“A rape kit?” he asked.

“Yep,” McNamara said. “And a pretty carefully put-together one, at that.”

So it appeared to be. At a glance Morrison saw rope, tape, lube, a knife and sap gloves—special gloves with lead sewn into the fingers. He looked up at the two sergeants.

“Please don’t tell me we forgot to voucher this stuff from one of the crime scenes?” he said.

“No, boss, we didn’t forget,” answered McNamara. “This didn’t come from a crime scene.”

Morrison was confused. “Well, where the hell did it come from, then?”

McNamara took a deep breath, then spoke quickly. “We had to put one of the cars into the shop for maintenance,” he said, “so I had Garriga take it over to the garage in Queens. He dropped off the car, and as he was leaving, one of the mechanics called him back over to the car—he’d seen this bag on the floor under the backseat. He hadn’t seen it before because the interior’s black.”

“Jesus, you don’t mean—”

“Yeah. Garriga brought it back from the shop, and when he got to the squad room he opened it to see whose it was. As soon as he saw this shit, he put on rubber gloves so as not to contaminate anything. He also found a pair of panties that looked like they had been ripped off of someone. We had him package those up and deliver them to the Medical Examiner’s Office for any possible DNA. He also found a pair of men’s shorts and a shirt—looked like workout gear—so we had him take that in as well.”

“Okay,” Morrison said slowly, trying to process everything. “So how the
fuck
did this bag get in the back of a police car?”

“We can’t be sure of that,” McNamara said. “But what we can tell you is the last person to sign out the car the night before.”

Morrison stared at him, the blood dropping out of his face. “Who?” he asked, with a sickening certainty that he already knew the answer.

“Lou Galipoli.”

Morrison closed his eyes, the nauseous rush of horror mixing with the sense of everything coming together.

The tape and rope used by their copycat, and by the two guys from Connecticut.

The facial bruising of the last two victims—easily accomplished with sap gloves.

The information from Sergeant Gonzalez.

Tina Koreski’s hunches, and his own.

The way they’d seen Galipoli look at their crime scene photos—interestedly, admiringly,
proudly…

“Who knows about this?” Morrison asked.

“As of right now, only the two of us, you, and Garriga,” Simmons said.

“Okay,” Morrison said. “This guy is obviously a sick fuck, but we’ve got to tie this all together and make sure we’re right. So far, we have an intense hatred for his attitude, a story from when he was in the military about a possible rape, and this rape kit. It may seem like enough, but it isn’t. We can’t say one hundred percent that it belongs to him—only that he’d signed out the car last. We need more information to take him down. I don’t like the idea of a rapist and killer on the job, but if he is one, we need to make sure he goes down hard.”

The other two nodded gravely as he went on.

“Now, this is going to collapse on us within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, so we need to act fast. I already have Rivera and O’Dell meeting with another military contact today, and you tell me we have the clothes from this bag at the ME’s office. Now we need to put some surveillance on Galipoli—and I mean
right away.
We also need to grab a sample of his DNA somehow, for the comparison. Ideas?”

“He smokes like a chimney,” Simmons said. “He’s always putting his butts in those periscope things out front of the precinct.”

“Great. I want you to
quietly
empty those things out, and let’s have someone make sure no one else uses them until he does. In the meantime, grab his coffee cup off his desk, get his tissue if he blows his fucking nose—whatever we have to do,
get it done.
I don’t have to tell you guys how this goes. McNamara, get the detectives we can trust the
most, and get surveillance going on him right away. We can’t afford another homicide now.”

Later, Morrison was back at his desk, the tension boiling in him. Detective Kasak stuck his head in the door.

“Chief Arndt on the phone for you, Cap,” he said.

“Tell him I’m not here,” Morrison growled.

“You got it,” Kasak smiled. “Where should I tell him you are?”

“I don’t know, whatever you want—tell him I took my goddamn grandmother to the zoo. I just can’t talk to that asshole right now.”

He heard Kasak return to his desk and pick up the phone. “Captain Morrison took the day off to bring his grandmother to the zoo,” he heard Kasak saying as Tina Koreski walked in and closed the door.

“Next in line?” Morrison said, his mood slightly lightened.

Koreski looked determined. “Cap, Sergeant McNamara just told me what’s going on, and asked me to do surveillance on Galipoli.”

“Okay, so?”

“I think I have a better idea.”

By this point, Morrison knew Koreski’s methods had more than earned his consideration. “Let’s take a walk,” he said. “I’m a little hesitant to speak about this in the office.”

They headed around the corner from the precinct house, to a little hole-in-the-wall diner a few blocks away where they had a small, closed-off private section they let cops use to talk. Once their coffee was on its way, Koreski leaned in.

“Cap, I know we don’t have enough yet to nail Galipoli for the copycat,” she said. “I think if we really want to get him, we need to catch him red-handed. Based on what we have so far, even if we got a match on the DNA a high-priced lawyer might be able to get him off—you know, convince a jury that there was contamination of the evidence, or try to say that we framed him. We haven’t exactly kept our dislike of the guy to ourselves.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” he admitted. “So what’s your plan?”

“The guy’s been asking me to go out with him since he got to the taskforce. He always told me it would be between us—he wouldn’t want anyone in the squad to know we went out, stuff like that. Why don’t I say yes?”

Morrison couldn’t believe his ears. “Tina, I can’t let you do that,” he said.

“Why not? This is the best chance we have of nailing this sick fuck. And if he isn’t the guy, the worst thing that happens is I get stuck listening to him rave about himself all night long.”

“And if he is? You’ll be in exactly the same situation you were in undercover, all those years ago.”

“Not at all,” she said coolly. “I’ll have
you
in charge this time, and backup I can trust. That makes all the difference in the world.”

Morrison considered. Koreski had certainly demonstrated her toughness to him. She might also be right; if Galipoli was the copycat, they’d need every ounce of positive evidence against him they could get, and his treatment of women was his weakest point. On the other hand, backup or no, it was extremely risky; if Galipoli was the one who’d perpetrated the last two murders, there was no telling what he could do, or how quickly he could do it, if he thought he’d get away with it.

Morrison looked at Koreski. Her eyes were steady, focused.

“Come on, Cap,” she said again, unshrinking under his glare. “You know I can do this, and we haven’t got time to think it over all day.”

He knew she was right.

“Okay,” he said. “But we’re going to have you wired, with at least three backup teams.”

“Great,” she said steadily, with an air of having thought it all through. “I want Kasak and Marchioni as my primary backup. I trust them, and I know they won’t let me go.”

Morrison smiled. “Careful what you wish for, Tina—you just might get it.”

“I’m counting on it,” she said. “And if you’re in charge of it, I know it’ll go fine.” She rose to her feet. “Hey, I’ll see you later, okay,
Cap?—Medveded and I are on night surveillance.”

“Okay, Koreski,” he said. He watched her on her way out as he signaled for the check. It was a strange effect; she looked so small, so vulnerable, but at the same time so self-contained. It seemed to him he’d never seen someone look so sure of themselves before.

God, I hope I’ve made the right decision,
he thought.

33

“I don’t know what the hell I’m gonna do with myself when I retire,”

Frankie Rivera said, shaking his head. “I mean, how does a guy go from seeing all the crazy shit we’ve seen, to sitting at home watching reruns of
Barney Miller?”

He and Jeffrey O’Dell were on their way up to Cold Spring, and in the course of their exchange of memorable moments from their work on the force—fairly typical cop talk, though pretty hair-raising by civilian standards—he’d gotten around to lamenting the little time he had left on the job before he had to go.

“I mean,
no
one understands us the way we do,” he went on. “That’s got to be the hardest part of leaving the job behind—the people.”

“It’s the hardest part of the job as it is,” O’Dell put in.

“Absolutely,” Rivera agreed emphatically. “I remember going to parties with my wife’s company—as soon as everyone hears you’re a cop, they all want to tell you about their experiences with one. Most of the time they ask questions about TV shows they’ve seen—
Do you guys really beat people in handcuffs? Have you ever shot someone?
They don’t know what a good cop’s job is really about, how much time we spend running around trying to put the goddamn bad guys in jail. There’s no family life; that’s why so many of us get divorced! We miss every
holiday, every birthday—”

“Every anniversary,” O’Dell said.

Rivera squinted his eyes, his lips curling up in a smile. “Oh, those are the worst,” he said. “They never let you live those down.”

“Never,” O’Dell agreed. “I remember this time, we were going to a wedding upstate, my wife and me. My wife’s sister is getting married, right? Little town. I know I got a long ride home afterwards, so I have a couple of beers. Not enough to get me drunk—though this was back in the day when drunk driving wasn’t the hot topic anyway—just literally a couple. And don’t you know, on the ride home my wife starts giving me shit about why can’t I be more like her sister’s new husband?
He
comes home every day at five.
They
spend every weekend together. No mercy, this breaking my balls. I started to feel like Charlie Brown listening to the teacher.”

“I’ve been there,” Rivera snickered.

“Well, so anyway, after a bit I turn to look at her to make a point, and a fucking deer bolts out in front of the car.”