by A. C. Fuller
6
At the sight of Robert Warren, Cole shielded her face with her hand.
A college baseball player turned Marine turned cop, Warren wasn’t just a big man, he was a specimen. She’d watched videos of his intense workout routines on Instagram while writing the story about him. Boxing. Weights. Running up hills in the park carrying a log over his wide shoulders. He may have been a brutal cop, but there was no denying that he took care of his body.
It wasn’t his size that worried her, though. It was his temper. And, on top of that, the fact that he had more reason to hate her than anyone else in the city. She'd written stories about controversial police incidents before, usually stories of white cops roughing up minority suspects. The story on Robert Warren was her first involving a black cop and a white suspect. Not that it mattered. To her, a brutal cop was a brutal cop. And every time she’d written one, the subject had been furious.
She peeked around her hand to get a better look, and the officer noticed. Warren turned. If he recognized her, she’d be able to read it in his eyes. He didn’t, and she tried to slip into the crowd.
“That’s her. Rob, that’s her.” The voice of the lanky officer. His tone had shifted from confrontational to conspiratorial.
“Who?” Warren asked.
She didn’t want this confrontation, but it was unavoidable, so she changed tack and took it head on. Swiveling on the heels of her leather flats, she strode forward and stuck out her hand. “My name is Jane Cole of the New York Sun. I’m the woman who ruined your life.”
Warren took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Clearly, he was trying to keep his anger from overcoming him. It was interesting to see someone else’s technique. When Jane herself needed to control the demon of anger, she went numb and lived in the static. Allowed pieces of herself to disappear into the background. Warren’s technique made him more dominant. He seemed to grow somehow larger—as if that were possible—until he filled out more of his already huge frame.
“Jane Cole?” His voice was deep and steady. “The one who wrote the article?”
“The same one you’ve been threatening.”
“Threatening the paper, with libel. I wasn’t threatening you personally. If I threatened you, you’d know it.” He turned to the lanky officer and sighed. “Anything worse than reporters?”
“Criminals?” the officer offered.
Warren scoffed. “Ask me, she’s the real criminal.”
Jane stood half a foot shorter than Warren and was probably half his weight. And though he was on paid leave, he was still a cop. Not the kind of guy she had any business threatening. The harsh light of a streetlamp shone down on her. She wanted to feel its light warming her, giving her courage, but the sun had set and a cold wind blew down Fifth Avenue. At times like this, the numbness served her work. Her life, his life, none of it mattered anyway. “Mr. Warren. Rob.” She slid right in front of him and glared into his dark eyes. “You’re a brutal cop and should be behind bars. I have your ex-wife’s number. Call my office again, I’ll get every reporter in the city to write about the period of your life after you left the Marines and before the department dropped its standards low enough to let a scumbag like you in. And to be clear”—she narrowed her eyes—“that was a threat.”
His face twitched. His right hand clenched at his side. She felt his desire to punch her as a palpable presence in the air. Inside, she was a field of gray static that knew only one thing: she’d gotten the story right. This was just another knuckle-dragger with a badge and a gun.
Warren opened his mouth to speak, but she walked away before he could.
Half a block away, the adrenaline wore off. What the hell had she just done? She glanced back at Warren, hoping he hadn’t pursued her. He stood there, arms crossed, staring right at her. He’d been watching her walk away.
To her shock, his face broke out in a wide grin.
7
After striking out with half a dozen cops and potential witnesses, Cole took a seat on the steps of a brownstone that sat on the edge of the crime scene. Twitter had nothing new on Ambani. Though his name was already trending worldwide—more than 800,000 tweets had been sent in the two hours since he died—nothing reliable was out there. Nothing story-worthy. On the ride from the office, she’d messaged a few of her best sources. No one had responded.
A sad irony struck her. Ambani’s blood was freeze-drying on the marble steps no more than a hundred yards away. Dozens of cops, detectives, and FBI agents surrounded her. And there she was, sitting on a cold stone step, staring at her phone for information and messaging cops through their anonymous burner accounts. This was the crime beat, 2018.
She decided to look into Raj Ambani himself, hoping some detail from his life might lead to a good source outside the department. His Wikipedia page had already been updated with news of his death. Information travels fast. She kept reading.
Raj Ambani was the sixty-third richest man in the world, valued at $17.1 billion, according to Forbes. One of only a handful of American success stories on the list, Ambani’s parents had immigrated from southern India in the mid 1980s, his father driving a taxi and his mother waitressing at Bombay Palace, a well-reviewed restaurant in the West Village.
From the time he was two, his parents knew he was special. Before he could speak in complete sentences, he could do multiplication and division. By the time he entered grade school, he was enrolled in a calculus class at City College. A 1994 newspaper article showed a six-year-old Raj, encircled by college freshmen, a pencil behind his ear and a serious look on his face. The opening line read, “His classmates call him ‘Rain Man,’ but Raj Ambani’s parents believe he’s the reincarnation of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the famous Indian mathematics prodigy of the early twentieth century.”
When he was thirteen, Ambani received a full scholarship to Columbia University, where he graduated in three years with degrees in math and computer science. From there, he pioneered computer-based stock trading, using algorithms to predict stock movements in real time. His invention lessened the importance of human evaluations and recommendations in the stock market, ushering in an era of markets ruled by computers. He became a billionaire on his twentieth birthday. Most impressive to Cole was that he seemed to have made a smooth transition into adulthood. Two years ago, at twenty-eight, he’d married an opera singer who was expecting their first child any day.
“You’ve got guts.”
Cole looked up from her phone. Rob Warren stood before her, hands in the pockets of his gray jeans.
“I respect guts, but I meant what I said about journalists being the lowest. If the facts won’t sell papers, just make something up, right?”
She stood and climbed two steps to meet his eye level. “Lower than cops who abuse their power?”
“I didn’t abuse—”
“Sure.” She smiled sardonically.
“You don’t know anything about me.” He pressed his hands into his cheeks and blew out a long stream of air. He looked ready to explode.
“I know you beat up unarmed suspects. Or that you did, once. I know you want to hit me. I understand. Really. This world gives us plenty to be enraged about. Have you checked your blood pressure lately?”
Warren shoved his hands in his pockets, chuckling. “It’s not good.”
“And you thought getting in my face would help?”
Warren stepped back. “You don’t know as much as you think.”
“Let’s not do this cops versus reporters thing, okay? It’s a cliché.”
Warren paced a little square. Two steps right, two steps forward, two steps left, two steps back. Military precision.
“Why did you come up to me?” Cole asked.
“I wanted to explain.”
“Explain why you broke the nose of a prisoner? An unarmed man? A man innocent until proven guilty?”
Warren waved the air as though shooing a fly. “I mean the period after I got back from Afghanistan. You dangled it in front
of me back there, threatened me, but that wasn’t in your story. Why not?”
“Wasn’t relevant to the story.” It was a lie, but the real reason would weaken her position.
Warren scoffed. “That’s a lie.”
Now he’d read her. “Honestly, what you did after you got back from Afghanistan was your business. I never would have put that in a story.”
“I appreciate that.” Warren walked another square, alternating between deep breaths and the double face-palm that seemed to be his pressure release valve.
She sensed there was something else on his mind. “You wanna tell me the real reason you approached me?”
He returned to his original spot. “I want to tell you what I know about Raj Ambani.”
8
They walked east for two blocks, Cole a dozen paces behind Warren and on the opposite side of the street. He’d lost the lower half of his right leg in Afghanistan, and now walked with an almost imperceptible limp.
When he’d approached her, information about Raj Ambani was the last thing she’d expected. In fact, Warren himself had seemed surprised by his words. A second after uttering the name, he’d whispered, “Meet me at the Starbucks on east 87th in ten.” Then he’d walked away.
Cole lifted the collar of her sleek blue coat against the cold wind as Warren turned north. When he passed under streetlights, she tried to make eye contact, but he marched forward, stone-faced, not looking back once.
* * *
Her piece on Warren hadn’t been a hit job. It hadn’t even been a big deal. Just another story about an NYPD cop abusing his power and the predictable department cover-up. The initial scoop had come from a direct message on Twitter. It was her least favorite social media platform but the one that, increasingly, comprised a major part of her job. On a Monday night two weeks ago she’d picked up a follow from a user with no profile picture and only a half dozen followers. The user’s handle was @NYPD_Watcher_NYPD and the bio read, “I tell the truth about cops.”
Cole had followed back and, minutes later, received a direct message.
@NYPD_Watcher_NYPD: I have information about an officer breaking a suspect’s nose. Interested?
@Cole_Jane_NewYorkSun: Yes.
@NYPD_Watcher_NYPD: I could give this to anyone.
@Cole_Jane_NewYorkSun: But you chose me. Why?
@NYPD_Watcher_NYPD: You’ll get it out fast, right?
@Cole_Jane_NewYorkSun: If it’s what you say, you have proof, and I can verify it, yes.
A minute went by before the next message, which contained a three-page PDF file. Cole read the document, an internal report on the incident. According to the report, at least one witness saw Robert Warren park his cruiser, open a rear passenger door, and smash a suspect’s face into the grate that separated the back seat from the front. Dashcam video confirmed this.
@Cole_Jane_NewYorkSun: Are you in the 30th?
@NYPD_Watcher_NYPD: No.
@Cole_Jane_NewYorkSun: IAB?
@NYPD_Watcher_NYPD: Ding ding ding. Boss is slow-rolling it.
@Cole_Jane_NewYorkSun: So, why me?
@NYPD_Watcher_NYPD: I tried The Times. They’ve had it two days.
@Cole_Jane_NewYorkSun: And?
@NYPD_Watcher_NYPD: Crickets.
@Cole_Jane_NewYorkSun: Why?
@NYPD_Watcher_NYPD: Dunno. Maybe they don’t want to implicate a black cop?
Just to be sure, Cole pulled up the metro section of The New York Times online. No mention of the incident.
@Cole_Jane_NewYorkSun: I have to ask: you willing to go on record?
@NYPD_Watcher_NYPD: LOL.
@Cole_Jane_NewYorkSun: They’ll confirm this is authentic?
@NYPD_Watcher_NYPD: They’ll have to. The pain of a story like this coming out is less than the pain of denying it officially, then seeing it on page 1.
Four hours later, Cole filed the story, complete with a denial from Robert Warren and a quote from a source in the 6th Precinct, admitting the troubling incident had occurred and assuring the good people of New York City that they would get to the bottom of it. The Sun ran the story on A1 of the print edition the next morning and on the homepage of the web edition. By noon, Warren had been suspended pending an investigation.
* * *
As she entered the Starbucks, Warren stood at the counter, ordering a double espresso. She paid for his coffee, plus a vanilla latte for herself, then followed him to the back. He picked a table in the corner and sat facing the wall—the least visible spot in the place.
Cole sipped her latte and raised an eyebrow at him. She’d let Warren do the talking. There was a chance he was trying to set her up, to discredit and embarrass her by planting a false story. Payback. Wouldn’t be the first time a cop had tried it. But something in his demeanor told her he was for real.
Every few seconds he glanced over his shoulder at the door. The ceramic espresso cup almost disappeared in his large hands as he passed it back and forth nervously. “I shouldn’t have come here.”
“I can tell there’s something you want off your chest.”
He shot the espresso in one gulp, then pointed at her paper cup. “Sugar. Lot of sugar in a vanilla latte. Between the milk and the syrup, I’m guessing thirty to forty grams?”
Not what she’d expected. “How the hell would I know? Are you here to scrutinize my coffee habits?”
He couldn’t let it go. “That’s not coffee. That’s a liquid candy bar.”
While she tried to pick the best of a dozen different smart-ass replies, his eyes darted down. A pair of officers had just walked in, but she didn’t think they’d seen him.
“If I’m seen with you and it gets back to my department, I’m screwed.”
His face was taut, the skin barely concealing a square jaw and sharp cheekbones. She wrote for a living, so her mind constantly puzzled over how to describe someone in the fewest possible words. If she’d had only one, it would have been brawny. If she’d had three: brawny, but anxious. She didn’t know what it was, but something simmered beneath his surface. Under that chiseled, carefully cultivated exterior, his anxiety was palpable.
She leaned in. “But you did come here, Rob.”
Again, she followed his eyes to the counter. The two officers were engrossed in conversation. Hand covering his mouth, he said, “I could be wrong about this, that’s the first thing you need to know. If I was sure, I’d…well...I don’t know what I’d do. The thing is—”
He paused as a teenage girl walked by on her way toward the bathrooms.
Cole was frustrated. “You said you knew why Ambani was killed.”
“I didn’t say that. I don’t know why.” He sighed and shook his head in a tight arc. “I really shouldn’t be here.”
“Look. I don’t like being screwed around with. If this has something to do with the story I wrote about you, I—”
“No. That story was BS, but...I just saw you there, and I need to tell someone.”
“Tell someone what?”
“War Dog!” The officer’s voice came from the direction of the counter.
Warren shot up. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I shouldn’t have come.”
Hurrying away, he took the outstretched hand of the officer and shook vigorously. Cole couldn’t hear their words from her table, but he seemed to be having a friendly conversation. Apparently he had a switch to flip as well. From anxious cop on leave to back-slapping colleague without a care in the world.
She watched in silence, just long enough to get angry. But she didn’t flick the switch to turn on the static. Instead, she bolted for the door, past Warren, and waved down a taxi. She slid in, but a hand grabbed the door as she tried to shut it.
“Wait a second,” Warren said.
She looked up from the back seat. “Stop jerking me around, Rob. What the hell is this about?”
He glanced over his shoulder, then squatted behind the door. “I don’t want to say too much, but if it comes out that the shooter used a fifty-calibe
r rifle, that the killing had professional written all over it, and that there’s no personal motive, call me. If those three things all come out, I may know something. Something I’m not in a position to tell the department, thanks to you. If not, I’m wrong and this conversation never happened.”
The taxi driver looked back. “We going or what, lady?”
Warren slowly closed the door.
By the time the taxi rounded the corner, Cole was dictating her story on the murder of Raj Ambani into her phone.
9
Monday
Robert Warren threw two quick jabs with his muscular left arm, then a right hook that knocked the heavy bag into his refrigerator. A half-full bottle of Rémy Martin 1738 wobbled on its base, nearly toppling off the top of the rusty fridge.
Warren watched, panting and sweating. Half of him wanted to dive for it, the other half hoped it would shatter on the cracked wooden slats of his kitchen floor. The bottle was a reminder of where he’d been. It represented everything he was now against—his healthy body being the foundation of his increasingly healthy mind—but he left it there to remind him. Of what he’d been and what he’d surely be again if he wasn’t careful. The bottle steadied and he went back to the bag as it swung toward him. Another right hook, then a torrent of jabs. Left, right, left, right, left, right. Chest burning, he stopped.
The bolts that held the bag to the ceiling creaked and the bag rocked back and forth like a pendulum, slowing and finally stopping.
As he cooled down, he stalked from the tiny kitchen through the windowless living room and into the bedroom. From a plastic milk crate—his “bedside table”—he grabbed a tub of grass-fed whey protein and returned to the kitchen. After downing two scoops mixed with organic almond milk for some healthy fat and extra post-workout calories, he stabbed at the screen of his cellphone, which he’d duct-taped to the top of the heavy bag.
