by John Cutter
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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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 179th Street; then take the E to Manhattan, where he’d switch to the 6 train at 51st Street; then take the 6 down to 23rd 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, 42nd 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 neig
hborhood 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 34th 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.
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 brin
g 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.
