by John Cutter
Morrison felt the old subliminal screaming hatred come over him. It was an irrational rage, a rage simply at everyone who wasn’t a cop, but it went hand-in-hand with the intense feeling of brotherhood on the force that incidents like this brought sharply into focus. At times like these he would think of everyone he’d ever heard make the familiar claim that the police were public servants, that it was taxpayer dollars that paid their salaries. Take a look at that cop, he thought, and tell me if you’re paying enough. Tell me—
McNamara patted him gently on the arm.
“Come on, Cap,” he said quietly. “This isn’t our place anymore; if they need us here, they’ll tell us. Let’s get over to the hospital, huh?”
Morrison nodded and walked back over to the car, his heart heavy and the bagpipes blowing loud.
10
Morrison’s detectives were gathered for Sergeant Rivera’s daily briefing on their daily assignments. The tension in the squad room was palpable. A week had gone by since their case’s second homicide, and the task force seemed to be no closer to solving the two cases than they were the first day.
It was a familiar axiom to most police departments that cases left unsolved after four days were in for the long haul. This had been a more pointed statement back when most homicides were committed by victims’ acquaintances; since the eighties, when crack hit the streets, homicides had become increasingly difficult to solve, due to the frequency with which murders were perpetrated by people the victims had never met or had much of anything to do with, outside of proximity or connection to the drug trade. But serial-killer cases were harder still in this respect; these were the cases where the connection between victim and killer was often altogether nonexistent.
“Galipoli and Garriga,” Rivera called out, passing photocopied sheets to the two detectives. “Here’s a list of all the big Fifth Avenue stores we haven’t hit yet. I want you guys to bring pictures of both victims with you, and hit every one of those shops to see if anyone working there recognizes either of them. We need to know if they remember anything about who might have helped them, or if anyone approached them in the store, to see if we can pick up some common link between the two.”
“You got it,” said Garriga.
“This is bullshit,” Galipoli muttered under his breath.
Morrison, listening at the back of the room, slammed his door open. “Galipoli, in my office—now,” he said.
Galipoli shrugged back at him. “What’d I do?” he asked casually. “Just get in here,” Morrison said. “We’re going to discuss it in private.”
Galipoli stood and headed over, snickering as Morrison shut the door behind him.
“You think this is funny?” Morrison barked. “Well, let me tell you something, pal: you’re a detective, and a brand-new one at that. Believe me, there’s absolutely nothing you ought to be laughing at around here right now, if you value your job.”
Galipoli stepped into Morrison’s face until he was standing toe-to-toe with him.
“Captain, let me tell you something,” he said, the same insufferable smirk still on his face. “I’ve been here a week now, and all I get are bullshit assignments. Go out and canvas this location, go check for cameras at that location. I’m not even getting to read the whole case folder; just the little bits and pieces that Rivera gives me at the morning briefing. But look, I’m not stupid. I know you guys are having team meetings without me, and that’s fucked up. I’ve got the right to know just as much as anyone else, and—”
“Sit the fuck down, Galipoli!” Morrison suddenly shouted. Startled for a moment out of his cocky pose, Galipoli took a seat.
“Now listen,” Morrison went on, “because I’m going to tell you what you have a right to in this office. This isn’t a schoolyard, or a Young Republicans meeting, or some other bullshit place where you get to have your say. This is a detective squad; and here, I’m the boss. That means, what I say goes. You get to know exactly what I want you to know. You aren’t the case detective here, you’re here to assist, and if that means you get one shitty assignment after another, guess what? You’re going to go out and do it, and be glad you’re getting to do anything at all. You don’t ever question an assignment given to you, especially on a case like this. As far as you know, the stores we’re sending you to could provide us with the only possible link between the victims in this fucking case. And let me say another thing,” he said more intensely, “just because I know what you’re thinking right now. I don’t give a shit who you have backing your assignment to my task force. I really don’t. If I think your presence is going to hurt this case, you’ll be gone in a heartbeat. You get that? The chief can only cover your ass so much. You have a lot of talented people around you, so rather than putting on your tough-guy prima donna act, you ought to try to learn something from them.”
Galipoli glared at him, a bright redness suffusing his face. “I’m as good as any of those people,” he seethed.
Morrison laughed in his face, then leaned in close to the furious detective. “You wouldn’t make a good pimple on one of their asses,” he said.
“You’re never going to know how wrong you are,” Galipoli said strangely, the smirk returning at the edge of his mouth.
“I’m sure I won’t,” Morrison shot back. “Now get your partner and get the fuck out of here.”
Galipoli stood and stormed out, grabbing his jacket on the way out of the squad room. Amid the restrained laughter of the others, Morrison called after Garriga.
“Hey Francisco,” he said. “Make sure all those stores get covered, whether he likes it or not.”
“You know it, boss,” Garriga replied.
“Thanks. And Garriga,” Morrison added, “just be careful out there, huh? We’ve got to deal with him for now, but I don’t trust that guy.”
“No worries, boss.” Garriga waved back at him with a broad smile. “I got him.”
A short while later, Detective Medveded poked his head in at the Captain’s door, a manila folder in his hand.
“Hey boss, you got a minute?” he asked.
“Sure,” Morrison said, gesturing him in. “What’s up, Alex?”
Medveded sat. “Well, I’ve been going over this case, and something’s been bothering me about the two scenes,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
The detective opened up the folder. “Well, look at these photos from the first scene at Sutton Place.”
“Okay, sure.”
“What do you see?”
“I see the victim: mutilated, some torn and scattered clothing, some potential DNA evidence, not much more.”
Medveded flipped ahead through the folder. “Okay. Now look at the second scene we discovered in Queens, and tell me what you see there.”
“Same thing: mutilated victim, torn clothing, some evidence of the victim being bound. Multiple cigarette butts, shoe prints on the carpet. So what are you thinking?”
“Well, unlike the first scene, this one takes place in multiple rooms, right? Doesn’t it seem to have been more chaotic than Sutton Place?”
“Sure, I guess you could say that.”
“Well, Cap, I think there’s a good reason for that. I think the one in Queens was committed first, before Sutton Place. At Sutton Place, they’re better at their craft: no cigarette butts left behind, no shoe prints, et cetera.”
“You may be right. Can we get confirmation from the medical examiner? If they can pinpoint the time of death for both our victims, it might help us down the road to catch these guys.”
“I’ll talk to them. We need to check with the lab guys anyway, to see if any of our fingerprint evidence has turned out.”
“Great. Thanks, Alex.”
As Medveded went out, Morrison mulled over this new information. The glimmer of hope it contained wasn’t much, but the change of direction could be good for the case. They’d been spending so much time on the Sutton Place murder, thinking it’d been the first; if Medveded was right, this woul
d involve quite a shifting of gears.
The office phone rang. It was Detective Hanrahan.
“Hey, Cap,” he said, his voice urgent, “we may have gotten a break here.”
“Yeah? What’ve you got, George?”
“Well, me and Tina went back over to Sutton Place to do some additional canvassing, and see if there we saw anything out of the ordinary, right? So as we’re working the block, we noticed a camera on the corner of 59th Street and Sutton Place, on a building we had no record of talking to before today.”
“All right, good. And—?”
“So me and Tina get the building’s super and ask him if anyone from the PD had spoken to him, and he says no. I figure it’s a stretch, since it’s a couple of blocks from the crime scene, but we ask him if he has the video saved from the night we’re thinking our murder took place. He tells us his video’s saved for sixty days—most of these buildings overwrite before thirty, you know, but this guy’s a tech guy. So he takes us into his office and sits there with us for a few hours, reviewing the footage, and based on what we saw, I think we have our victim walking towards her building alone.”
“You sure?”
“We can’t be one hundred percent, because it’s dark and the video is a little grainy, but we think it’s her. We also got what looks like two guys exiting a black car from the opposite corner, walking behind her.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah, a couple of preppy types. Not sure if they followed her all the way home, but what’s interesting is, several hours later we see these same two guys going back toward their car. They’re in an awful hurry and they look all disheveled, like they’d been in a fight.”
Morrison was ecstatic. “George, this is great work! Don’t tell me the video has a time and date stamp on it—?”
“Yep, as a matter of fact, it does, boss,” Hanrahan said. “We already have a couple of copies. And there’s more, too—when these guys get back in their car we get a shot of their license plate. It’s blurry, but we can see it isn’t a New York plate.”
“Oh man, that’s awesome news, George—really great news. Let’s get the video over to our guys in the lab and see if they can enhance what we have there. We’ll also need to pull a couple of teams to go back over all the video in the area, now that we have a possible timeframe—we could easily have overlooked something before. Great work, you two.”
He hung up, beaming in spite of himself. Two moves in a day—this was great! He called Rivera in.
“Frankie, I just spoke to Hanrahan—we need to get the Coke boys and McNamara’s crew over to Sutton Place right away.”
“I’m already on it, boss—I was on the phone with Tina just now, getting the same briefing,” Rivera said excitedly. “Hey, this could be it, huh? Nothing like hard-nosed detective work to get a case solved!”
“Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves—we don’t even know for sure if this is our victim, much less if these two guys actually followed her. But yeah, it’s great work. And Frankie,” Morrison added, his voice lowering, “let’s keep this under wraps. We don’t need Galipoli or Arndt screwing this up just yet.”
“No problem, boss. We’ll keep it close.”
Towards evening, Morrison was still riding the high of the day’s new discoveries when Garriga breezed in, alone, and asked tersely to speak with him. He waved the detective in, and without a word Garriga slumped in the chair in front of him. It was only now that Morrison saw the frustration on his face.
“What’s going on, Francisco?” Morrison asked. “You okay?”
“Sure, sure,” Garriga began abstractedly, then stopped. He looked hard at Morrison. “Look, boss, you know this isn’t something I’d ever do normally, but I can’t work with this Galipoli guy another day.”
Morrison was surprised. “Why, what happened?”
“Ah, Cap, you know I’d rather not—”
“I’m going to need to know, Detective,” Morrison insisted. Garriga blew out a long breath. “Well, it’s been all day, really. It started pretty much when we left here. I thought he should drive, so I got into the passenger side, and I was barely inside with the door closed when the fucker steps on it and speeds off. Real dick-swinging bullshit kind of stuff. So I said, Hey, Lou, slow down, we don’t need to get in an accident, and this guy tells me to go fuck myself.”
Morrison smiled. “Okay. So what’d you do?”
“I told him to pull the car over and get out with me, so we could settle things. I walked over between a couple of buildings, and he followed me. I tell him, Look, man, I need to explain something to you. Nobody talks to me that way. And this asshole, he starts trying to step to me, getting all big in my face and telling me to stop lecturing him.”
Morrison’s smile grew wider. “Let me guess. You hit him with a good solid right.”
“Two lefts and a right,” Garriga corrected him. He looked up quickly. “But look, Cap, it wasn’t like I knocked the guy out. I just needed him to know he needs to show me some respect.”
“It’s all right, Francisco,” Morrison laughed. “I had a feeling something like this might happen, and I knew you’d be the right man for it. How’d he take it?”
“Not good, Cap, that’s the thing. There was no apologies, no talk, no nothing—he just gets back in the car with all this rage in his face. The guy’s not right, boss. He really isn’t. We didn’t say a word to each other all day after that. Look, you know I’ll do anything for you—it’s just—is there any way you can assign him to somebody else? I just think it’s going to get ugly if we keep working together, and I don’t want that on my hands.”
“Don’t worry about it, Francisco—you’ve put in your time. I’ll figure out someone else to pair him up with.”
Garriga was noticeably relieved. “Thanks, Cap. I really appreciate it.” He rose. “I’m going to head out, if you don’t need anything—?”
“No problem. It’s been a big day, for a lot of reasons; I’m about ready to turn in too. Have a good night. Oh, and Detective?”
Garriga stopped in the doorway. “Yeah?”
Morrison smiled. “Thank you. I really mean it.”
“All in a day’s work, Cap,” Garriga laughed on his way out.
11
Bill Morrison blinked awake and rolled out of the bunk. It had been almost a week since he’d been home; thankfully, it was a situation he was used to, and he always kept extra supplies in the office.
After a quick rinse in the shower, he checked the time—just after 0700 hours. Time enough for a call with Louise Donohue and a visit to her husband’s grave before the day’s work began. Normally he would have preferred to drive out and visit Louise in person, but with the case running as it was, and with her living up in Stamford now to be closer to her family, it was a bit of a stretch.
He spoke to Francis Donohue’s widow often; and in keeping with the Chief’s last wishes, he still made it a point to visit her every month or so to make sure she was getting along all right. At least, that’s how Morrison framed it for himself, though really, the two of them had suffered through their losses together, and speaking with her was as therapeutic for him as it was for her.
The conversation over the phone with Louise was grounding and normal, exactly the sort of thing Morrison looked forward to about talking with her. Her voice bore the same weary tone his had since his son’s death, and with the same layer of comfort from the rest of the family prospering. Her kids were grown up now with families of their own, and were doing well. Her daughter had moved out West to raise a family, and one of her two sons had recently left the force with a disability, at which Louise secretly rejoiced. Morrison told her about Claudia, and the chemistry he’d already felt with her. There was no judgment or demand for logic in Louise’s response; she understood immediately, complications and all.
When they’d talked for an hour or so, Morrison excused himself with the usual transparent excuses. He never told Louise when he was going to visit Francis’s g
rave, but he always suspected she knew somehow; perhaps it was his imagination, but on those days their signoffs always had a knowing undertone to them.
He had realized the night before that he’d spoken a bit flippantly in telling Garriga he’d be able to find someone else to partner with Galipoli. He now realized that the alternatives were very few. All of his senior people were already paired up in teams that worked well together; it would be crazy to interrupt that working rhythm, especially in the middle of a case like this, just to saddle one of them with a guy whose integrity he already had serious doubts about. The odd person out, he’d realized, was Tina Koreski. He wasn’t happy about putting her—of all people—with a guy like Galipoli, who he’d already heard had problems with women; but if he didn’t want Garriga losing it with the guy, he didn’t have much choice. Besides, he told himself, Tina was a strong woman, with more than enough fortitude to kick Galipoli in the ass if he got out of line with her.
On his way out, he left a note for Sergeant Rivera: Sorry to do this to you, but I need you to tell Tina she’s going to be paired with Galipoli moving forward. She won’t be happy, but tell her I need her to do this for me. If she needs to talk to me, tell her I’ll be back later. He thought a moment, then added, By the way, talk to Garriga and see if he’s gotten any impression of Galipoli’s military experience. I forgot to ask him about it yesterday, and I’m curious what he thinks.
Saint Raymond’s Cemetery, in the Throgs Neck area of the Bronx, was the only Catholic cemetery in that borough. In 1932 it was used as the meeting place between Charles Lindbergh and the kidnapper who’d taken his son, a fact on which Bill Morrison never failed to reflect during his visits there. It had been called “The Crime of the Century”—an abduction for what was at the time an enormous ransom. Despite the paying of that ransom, at this very cemetery, the kidnapper (or kidnappers, as many had suspected) had murdered the infant child anyway, and deposited his remains to be discovered six weeks later. Quite a shame—but not the only one Morrison associated with this place.
