by David DeLee
Levy had the passenger door open almost before Flynn had stopped. She was out of the car and rushing across the street before he threw the battered car’s gearshift into park. He jumped out and ran after her.
Evans, the cop who had called them, stood on the Stokes’ stoop. He looked pale. He saw Levy approaching and put up a hand. “Detective, easy. You might want to think twice before going in there.”
“What happened?” she demanded. Flynn climbed the stoop behind her.
“We got a 911 call. Shots fired,” Evens said. “By the time we got here, it was too late.”
“Too late for what?” Levy asked.
When he didn’t answer, she shouldered past him and entered the house.
A dozen people were milling around the tiny living room. Uniformed cops and detectives. Radio chatter filled the air. Two men wore CSU windbreakers. A woman in a dark pantsuit stood in the archway talking to Vachon, Evans’ partner, the other cop who’d responded to the domestic disturbance call the day before.
So much had happened since then. Had it only been the day before?
As Levy moved into the room Vachon noticed and left the woman he’d been talking to. He called out, “Detective Levy.”
But he couldn’t distract her.
She’d already spotted the blood and brain matter splattered across the mantel of the red brick fireplace, across the trophies, across photographs of the Stokes family. Droplets of red leaked down the smooth glass surfaces. The TV was on. Someone had paused the program. The image was frozen under a fine spatter of blood. The looped HAPPY THANKSGIVING holiday with the paper turkey in the middle were covered in blood spatter.
A news program Levy had seen. Stokes must have taped it or was watching it being rebroadcast. It had been a scathing expose of recent NYPD shootings and of Ben Stokes in particular. The network had played it endlessly, over and over.
Most of the people in the room stood between her and the brown leather easy chair that faced the TV. It was in the reclined position. The foot rest up. She could tell someone was sitting in it.
“Get out of my way.” She grabbed a CSI and a detective by the shoulders and pulled them apart. They moved without protest.
Ben Stokes lay in the easy chair. His feet on the raised footrest. He wore gray socks.
A nearly empty bottle of Wild Turkey stood on a tray table next to the chair. Stokes’ right hand stretched to the floor. The back of his hand rested on the worn carpet. His service weapon lay in his open hand, his finger still inside the trigger guard.
Flynn came up behind her. He grabbed her by the shoulders. “Christine.”
“What happened here?” Levy shouted. “They returned a no bill indictment. He was exonerated.”
“Maybe nobody told him,” Vachon said.
“Or it was simply too little, too late,” the woman with him said. Levy saw she had a gold badge pinned to her belt. “The pressure of it all must have been too much.”
Flynn turned to Vachon. “What the hell, man?”
Vachon looked at Ben Stokes’ bloody body. The small, neat contact wound was blackened around the edges. A small trickle of blood had leaked from the opening. The worst damage and most of the blood spatter was from the exit wound. It wasn’t visible from this angle. Thank God for small favors.
“We responded to a shots fired call. Neighbors reported hearing a single shot, reporting it came from here. Evans and I had responded to the earlier domestic call—”
Flynn nodded.
“When we came up the stoop we could see through the bay window. See…this. I kicked in the door while Evans called it in.”
“Please! Don’t go in there!” Evans called out from the front porch.
Everyone turned to see Karen Stokes rushing breathless into the small foyer from the open door. She wore a winter coat. Her eye was bruised from the earlier battering she’d taken.
“No. No. No.” Levy rushed over and wrapped her arms around her, pulling Karen into a hug and turning her away. “Don’t.”
“Ben!” she shrieked in Levy’s ear “Is it Ben?”
The anguish in her voice ripped at Levy’s heart.
“Come on.” Levy turned Karen around and forcibly steered her toward the door, taking her outside. “Let’s go outside.”
“Ben! Ben.” Karen covered her face in her hands, muffling her cries. Her hands shook. Her body trembled in Levy’s grasp. “We were out Christmas shopping,” she wailed. “This can’t be happening.”
Evans stood at the doorway. “She...she rushed past me. I couldn’t stop her.”
“The little girl. Her daughter,” Flynn said to Evans. “Where is she?” He rushed to the front door, looked out. “Where is she?”
He saw the Stokes’ green Subaru Forester parked in the street behind their unmarked car. He saw Rebecca through the back seat window. Her tiny face and two hands were pressed up against the glass. He could read the fear on her face. Saw the tears that tracked down her cheeks.
“Keep her in that car,” Flynn shouted to a nearby cop.
“You don’t need to be here,” Levy said to Karen, guiding her down the outside stoop. “You don’t need to see that.”
None of us do, she thought. leading Karen back to her car, taking her away from Ben Stokes, her husband, the final victim.
Westchester Country Club
99 Biltmore Avenue, Rye, NY
Sunday, December 3rd 10:45 a.m.
IN THE PARKING LOT of the Westchester County Club, Flynn leaned casually against the fender of his personal vehicle, a ten-year-old green Honda Accord with a small dent in the driver’s side quarter panel and a deep key scratch across the passenger side door. He wore blue jeans and under his leather bomber jacket, a gray NYPD hoodie.
An unseasonably warm day for early December, the sun was high and bright overhead in a cloudless, brilliant azure sky. It was a peaceful day filled with evergreen trees and still lush rolling hills of grass, perfect for a last round of golf before the coming winter.
Too bad he didn’t play golf, he thought as he watched Theodore Goodall emerge from the main building. The civil rights activist wore the colorful getup of golfers everywhere: checkered bloused pants with argyle socks, a white collared shirt under a mustard yellow sweater vest, and a denim striped driver’s cap. Behind him, his caddie lugged a loaded gray, black, and teal golf bag on his shoulder.
Goodall’s black Porsche SUV pulled up behind Flynn’s car.
A burly bald black man in a dark suit stepped from the luxury vehicle as the rear gate unlatched with a click and opened as if by magic. Flynn noticed the bulge of a gun under the suit tailored to hide it.
“Put the clubs in the back,” Goodall said to the caddie as he veered toward Flynn. “This could constitute harassment. Stalking at the very least.”
The chauffeur slash muscle joined them. “You okay here, boss?”
“Am I, Detective?”
“I’m not looking for any trouble. I’m just here to talk.”
“I think we’re good, Gabe.”
Gabe gave Flynn a parting, warning glance and retreated to the back of the SUV.
“The District Attorney dropped all charges against me, Detective.”
“A plea deal in exchange for your cooperation against Joseph Gregg. I heard.”
“That pisses you off, doesn’t it?”
Flynn shook his head. “In fact, just the opposite. I pushed for it.”
Goodall paused pulling off his golfer’s gloves and looked up. “I’ve got to say, that surprises me.”
“It shouldn’t,” Flynn said. “I’m not opposed to what you’re trying to do. I’m against how you go about it.”
Goodall stiffened. “I had nothing to do with what Tillman and Gregg did. If I had knowledge of that, I’d have shut that shit down immediately.”
“I believe that.” At Goodall’s skepticism, Flynn said, “I do. If that wasn’t the case, Tillman would have looped you in. He didn’t.”
“Then why a
re you here?”
“To determine the measure of a man.”
“What in the hell’s that mean?”
“I’m here to see if you’re serious about really wanting to make a difference. If son the first step, would be to listen.”
Less defensively, Goodall said, “To what?”
Flynn took off his sunglasses. “Can you tell me how many unarmed police shootings there are in this country in a given year?”
“Too many.”
“Sure,” Flynn said. “That goes without saying. Less than twenty. Across the entire United States. That’s out of around a thousand police shootings. In any given year.”
“Your point?”
“Every time a cop pulls his guns and kills someone, that shooting needs to be investigated to the fullest extent possible,” Flynn said. “Every detail scrutinized so we can determine what went wrong and if there’s a way we can do better next time. If there’s an abuse of power, poor training, aggression on the part of that officer, it needs to be identified and those who do wrong need to be punished.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Goodall said.
“Not exactly,” Flynn said.
Goodall started to speak. Flynn held up his hand. “Willingness to listen.”
The civil rights leader snapped his mouth shut and nodded.
Flynn went on. “You immediately malign the police and absolve everyone else of any responsibility. You blame the cop without any information, without facts, or any proof of wrongdoing. You whip the community up into a feeding frenzy and paint every cop as a racist with a singular goal of gunning down unarmed black men. You’ll never solve this problem by just vilifying the police.”
“Or by just blaming the victim,” Goodall countered.
“Agreed. We need to do better. We can do better. Both sides need to accept responsibility for their part in how we got here.”
“What are you getting at, Detective?”
“The NYPD is a department of nearly forty thousand people. Mostly good, hard-working people who just want to do their job, do some good, and go home at the end of their shift. Others, bad apples, not so much. Like any large segment of the population, we’ve got our good and our bad, the exceptional and the mediocre. That’s why there’s an IAB. That’s what people like Christine Levy are there for.”
“Are you suggesting the public, my people, should just trust you to self-regulate? To self-discipline?”
“Not at all. We need to be held accountable. I’d even say held to a higher standard. All I’m asking is you give us a chance to do our jobs first. Give us a reasonable amount of time to figure out what happened, then time to make it right.”
“To bury it? Make it go away?”
“A little time won’t change the facts,” Flynn said.
“And if you can’t, or won’t, make it right?”
Flynn smiled. “Then we can always count on people like you to hold our feet to the fire.”
Goodall remained thoughtful for a moment. “Was that the point of this little get together, to get us to be less…reactionary?”
“That’s part of it.” Flynn handed him a folder he had tucked under his arm. “And to give you this.”
“What’s this?” Goodall asked taking the offered folder.
“Food for thought. With one thousand police shootings, on average in a given year, and the vast, vast majority of those being justified—”
“According to your people.”
“And the media, the ones who take the time to get their jobs right, and the Justice Department, even the CDC and others, but that’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
“The number of people of color who are killed in non-police shootings each year. Can you tell what that number is?”
“I’m sure you’re about to.”
“Seven to eight thousand, again in any given year. But on average it’s a pretty consistent number across the nation. In cities like New York, but it’s even worse in Detroit, Baltimore, Philly, Chicago. Gang violence. Drive-by shootings. Radom robberies. Black-on-black crime. That’s where the real problem lies.” Flynn slipped his sunglasses back on. “If I wanted to help my community—really help and not just pay lip service—I’d concentrate my efforts where the problem’s the worst and where I could make the greatest possible impact.”
“Meaning?”
“That file contains crime rate data for the ten worst high-crime neighborhoods in the city. Places in Brooklyn and upper Manhattan, the Bronx. There’s a lot of good people who live there, men, women, and children, who every day live in fear and are just trying to survive, to get to the next day. That’s where you’ll find the people that need your…need our help the most.”
Flynn started to walk around to the driver’s side of his car. “It’s easy to blame, look for the simple answer. Unfortunately, the problem isn’t simple and the solutions won’t be come by easily. There’s a detective at the Seventy-Third precinct in Brownsville, his name’s Hector Calderon. His contact info’s in the file. You should talk to him.”
Flynn slipped his sunglasses back on and opened the car door.
Goodall called out. “Detective.” Flynn looked across the hood.
Goodall circled around the car and stood in front of him. “You expect me to do this by myself or is there a chance I can expect some help? See what it’s like being on the same side, for a change.” Goodall held out his hand.
Flynn handed him his business card then shook his hand. “You’ve got my number, Theodore.”
As Flynn drove away, he smiled.
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The Complete Grace deHaviland series
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ALSO BY DAVID DELEE
Novels & Novellas
Facing the Storm
Too Far
Stare at the Moon
Moral Misconduct
Takedown
Out of the Game
With Intent to Deceive
Pin Money
Crystal White
Fatal Destiny
Short Story Collections
Mystery, Mayhem & Murder
Tainted Badge
Runners
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David DeLee is the award-winning author of the Grace deHaviland Bounty Hunter series, including the novels Fatal Destiny, Pin Money, With Intent to Deceive, Takedown, Stare at the Moon and Too Far. David's also written many short stories featuring Grace, most notably Bling, Bling, which appeared in the anthology The Rich and the Dead edited by Nelson DeMille.
David’s other work includes the novel Crystal White which SUSPENSE MAGAZINE called “…a dark portrayal of the evil that men—and women—can do.”, the second novel in the Nick Lafferty series, Out of The Game, and a novel-length collection of short stories called Murder, Mayhem & Mystery: An Omnibus of Crime Fiction.
A member of the Mystery Writers of America and the International Thriller Writers organization, and a former licensed private investigator, David also holds a Master’s Degree in Criminal Justice. He makes his home in New Hampshire.
For more information, be sure to check us David’s website out www.daviddelee-author.com/
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