Chapter Eight
Reynaldo Francisco parked his police car in the station lot and told dispatch he was logging off for the day. He took his clipboard from the passenger seat and opened his on-board computer to read the newest email from Deputy Superintendent Tovarich. It was the one with the subject heading: IMPORTANT!!!!!!
Attention ALL Officers
Effective immediately, ALL OFFICERS are to do the following without exception upon completion of your shift:
All Officers SHALL write down their vehicle's mileage and how many miles driven that day
All Officers SHALL tally how many tickets they wrote that day (Warnings DO NOT COUNT)
All Officers SHALL tally how many calls for service they had that day
All Officers SHALL tally how many arrests they had that day
All Officers SHALL inventory their gear and assure it is in proper working condition
All Officers SHALL check their patrol vehicle to ensure it is fully fueled and contains all liquids including coolant, oil, transmission fluids, etc.
If you have ANY questions, comments, or concerns you are to direct them to MY office. This does not mean discuss it with anyone else BUT me.
Failure to comply with ANY of the above shall result in future discipline.
Deputy Superintendent W. Tovarich II
The words "All Officers SHALL" rang in Reynaldo's head like a tone poem as he went down the list with his finger and scribbled down the correct items. Once he finished going through that email, he opened up the next five in succession, reading them in the order they were delivered that week.
Monday: New Rules Regarding Saluting
Inferior Officers SHALL salute their superiors once per day upon first greeting, in or out of uniform, whether or not they are working, to include any rank greater than Officer such as Corporal, Deputy Superintendent or Chief.
Further, upon the entrance of any superior officer into the room, all inferior officers are required to stand until told to rest.
Tuesday: Clarification of New Rules Regarding Saluting
To clarify, all inferior officers SHALL salute and rise for their superior officers. Members of the superior rank are exempt from this rule.
Wednesday: Discussion of Police Department Matters FORBIDDEN
Effective immediately, all officers SHALL cease discussion of any and all internal matters (including policy changes) regarding this police department with ANY outside source. This includes any and all friends, family members, township employees, and township supervisors.
To ensure compliance with this rule, members of the police department are ORDERED AND DIRECTED to report any fellow member who may be in violation.
Thursday: Clarification of Discussion of Police Departmental Matters
Yesterday's rule applies to all personnel who have not been otherwise advised by the Chief of Police, W. Tovarich I.
As he read through the emails, his on-board computer dinged with an incoming message from the Deputy Superintendent. The subject heading read: Posting of Items in the Station
To All Officers:
Effective immediately, the posting of any items, flyers, posters, pictures, or other things, on any surface of the police department is hereby forbidden without prior permission from the Chief of Police. This includes desks, walls, doors, lockers, etc.
You have until tomorrow at noon to remove any personal items you wish to keep. After that time, they will be disposed of.
The police department is a professional environment and must be maintained as such at all times. It is not your "home" and does not belong to you, so do not treat it as such.
If you have ANY questions, comments or concerns you are to direct them to MY office. This does not mean discuss it with anyone else BUT me.
Failure to comply with ANY of the above shall result in future discipline.
Deputy Superintendent W. Tovarich II
He slammed the lid of his computer down and jumped out of the seat, hammering the code into the police station door to see several officers in the station silently loading pictures of their wives and drawings from their children into boxes. "This is absolute bullshit!" Reynaldo called out. Several heads turned to look at him, all except Officer Brian Boxer, who was dutifully wrapping newspaper around a framed picture of his dead dog, Bullhorn.
"How can you let this happen?" Reynaldo shouted at Boxer.
"What can the PBA do?" Boxer shrugged.
"I don't know, that's why I pay dues to the PBA so it is run by elected officials who can answer that question!"
"Look," Boxer hissed, "keep it down. Just go with the program and do your work and everything will be fine. This is just growing pains."
Reynaldo grabbed a handmade card sent to him by a little boy thanking him for saving his mother. It showed a crayon drawing of a police officer and the little boy holding hands. "How is this bad?" Reynaldo cried out. "How is this not professional to any fucking person who walks into this accursed place!"
Boxer suddenly looked up as the figures of the Deputy Superintendent and Corporal Donoschik filled the doorway of the interview room, staring at all of them. "Here," Reynaldo said, waving the little boy's card as he headed to the document shredder. "Is this what you want? Fine. I shred the fucking thing so nobody has to be offended by some little kid's appreciation."
Both men glowered at Reynaldo, who balled his fists and said, "What? You want to say something? Go ahead!"
Corporal Donoschik hooked his thumbs in his glossy leather gunbelt and said, "I believe your first mistake was forgetting to salute your superior officers."
Reynaldo turned on his heels and said, "Suspend me. I could use the free day off." He pointed at the other officers standing around watching and said, "All of you are damned cowards. I'm going home."
Twenty minutes later, Reynaldo was sitting in a bar drinking a tall, cold glass of beer when his phone rang. It was Frank. "I heard you let off some steam," Frank said.
"I couldn't help it."
"It happens. They'll get over it."
"Who told you?"
"Boxer. He asked me to check on you."
"Because he's too afraid to do it himself."
"Because he thought I'd have a better chance of getting through to you."
"I'm fine."
"Oh yeah?" Frank said, sounding disappointed.
Reynaldo picked up his glass and took another long sip. "Absolutely perfect."
"That's a shame. I was hoping you were angry enough to get in some trouble with me about the Fred Phelps case."
Reynaldo set his glass down immediately and said, "What time and where?"
They met the next morning at Frank's house at 0800 hours. Reynaldo showed Frank the file as he got into his car and said, "I brought everything. Now where are we going?"
"Immigrations," Frank said.
Reynaldo rolled his eyes, "Very funny. I'm in no mood for jokes, okay? You can bust my balls later."
"Who's busting balls?" Frank said. "I'm dead serious. We're going to Immigration. When Immigration and Customs combined, they absorbed all international child pornography investigations. I've got a friend down there who can help us."
"Oh. Well in that case, let's go."
Frank looked at him blankly, "Why did you think I was busting your balls?"
"Because that's what you do."
"But why would I be…Oh…you mean because you're Mexican," he said with a light smile.
"Si, senor," Reynaldo drawled.
"See, I didn't even think of that. My mind doesn't work that way, Reynaldo. I've evolved past such things now."
Reynaldo laughed and tapped the file on his lap nervously, "My God, it feels good to be doing police work again!"
Frank looked sideways at the younger man and said, "Speak for yourself, buddy."
Forty-five minutes later they arrived in Center City. Frank sprang the twenty bucks it cost to park in a garage because he didn't feel like driving around in circles until a spot ope
ned up on the street. Parallel parking on the narrow city streets was a bitch anyway and he wasn't in the mood to waste any more time.
The eager look on Reynaldo's face was wearing on Frank. The badge pinned inside his wallet felt heavy and uncomfortable. After so many years of The Job, he found that it was easier to put down than he'd thought. And once put down, he was loathe to pick it up, or to pretend to be interested, and the sooner they'd passed the case off to ICE the better.
They headed for an office building in the middle of the block, its glass front marked in drab yellow letters that read Department of Homeland Security. Frank dropped his badge and keys and pocket knife in the security officer's bucket and passed through the metal detector without making a sound. Reynaldo held up his badge and pulled open his shirt to show the guards his gun. They waved him through and ignored the alarm when it blared. "You aren't armed?" Reynaldo said as they waited for the elevator.
Frank shook his head, "I never carry off duty."
"Why? That's not responsible. What if something happens and you need to take action?"
"I'll call 911 and be a good witness."
"What if someone is in serious danger?"
Frank shrugged, "Then I guess I'll have to do what I have to do."
The elevator dinged and they got on. "Not if the bad guy has a gun, you won't."
"When I was a kid, my old man carried everywhere he went, so he was always in cop-mode. We'd be driving down the street and somebody would cut him off and he'd follow that person just to scream at them. I'd be with him in the car and he'd be rolling down his window telling them what a stupid piece of shit they were. He'd always say, 'Do you know who the fuck I am?' Always the tough guy. One time we went to the movies and these kids were standing outside the theater talking. My old man heard them using the F-word and came unglued on them, got all in their faces, telling them what was what. I went to school with every single one of them. The next day, I got jumped in the bathroom."
"That sucks."
Frank nodded, "I was standing at the urinal, and this kid came up behind me and kicked me in the back. I was still pissing when they took turns hitting me in the back of the head, trying to get my zipper up and defend myself. It didn't work. To this day, I'm pee shy. Can't go if someone else is around me or talking too loudly. Sounds stupid, right?"
"No," Reynaldo said. "It doesn't. So you don't carry a gun because you hate your father?"
Frank curled up his face at Reynaldo's words and said, "What? No, I don't hate him."
"You hate cops."
"Most of them, yeah," Frank said.
"And yet you became one?"
"I became one because I thought I could do a better job of it. Turns out it's a lot more complicated than that."
The elevator opened on the sixth floor and Frank gave his name at the front desk and asked for Amelia Erndt. The secretary picked up her phone and said Frank's name, then hung up and said, "She'll be right out."
"Frank O'Ryan!" a woman's voice boomed from down the hall. Amelia stormed down the hall toward them, her short, squat frame hurtling forward atop six inch heels. She grabbed him in a wide hug, crushing him against her pendulous bosom and said, "You son of a bitch. What is this bullshit I hear about you trying to leave the police department?"
"It's true, I'm afraid," he said.
"Did you get another job?"
"I decided I'm going to be independently wealthy. Unfortunately, it's off to kind of a slow start."
Amelia laughed and thrust her hand at Reynaldo to get his name, squeezing his hand like a man would. "Come back to my office, you two." They followed her down the hall to her small, cramped office. It was stacked chest high with boxes for various cases and her desk was wedged in between two different filing cabinets. "Excuse the mess, guys. I just got back from Romania on a job. We helped shut down a major human trafficking organization. Tons of suspects, tons of victims."
"Romania?" Frank said. "Impressive."
"It was Turkey a month before that, and North Africa before that. You should see my passport," she said. "It's a mess."
Frank waved his hand for Reynaldo to open the Phelps file and start spreading it out on Amelia's desk. "Hopefully this one will be easier for you. We got information that this guy is manufacturing kiddie porn at a store in town. Light stuff, mainly, from what we can tell. Kids getting changed in dressing rooms, that sort of thing. Our source told us that he's also trading in harder files, though."
Amelia nodded as Frank spoke and bent forward to look over the paperwork. They went through the file piece by piece with both Frank and Reynaldo explaining all of the details, until she came to the last page. "Give me a few minutes," Amelia said. "I want to go look something up."
They told her no problem as she collected the case file and left them standing in the office. Frank folded his arms against his chest and said, "I don't hate my dad."
"Okay," Reynaldo said. "Forget I said it, then. You know what? I love being a police officer. I love the job and helping people, but I am starting to seriously hate where I do it."
"Every place is screwed up, Rey-Rey. Every department has problems."
"Yes, but at least in big departments you get the chance to move around if you want. There's more opportunities."
"I agree. I have no idea why you ever left New York. If I was you, I'd have stayed there and joined the NYPD in an instant."
Reynaldo nodded silently, keeping his eye on Amelia's door.
"So why didn't you?"
"Do what?"
"Be a cop in New York?"
"Because of my mother. She made me promise I would never work in the city, any city, so that I would be safe."
Amelia's heels scraped the carpet as she made her way back to the office and opened the door, waving their case file triumphantly, "I knew it. I knew I recognized that asshole's name. We worked a case on Frederick Phelps last year and got this close to popping him for the distribution of child pornography."
"What happened?" Frank said.
"Technology happened. Back in the good old days, we could trace providers and purchasers of this shit pretty easily. They were paying with PayPal, or downloading it off of peer-to-peer file sharing networks. Remember Limewire?" Amelia asked.
"Sure. It's where I got all my music from," Frank said.
"There were only a dozen or so actual child pornography files on Limewire, and all we had to do was sit on them and wait for people to download them. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Just downloading one of those files was enough for us to get a search warrant and seize whatever the person had in their computer. Invariably, one arrest would lead to a dozen others."
"Just like drug work," Frank said.
"Exactly. But then the bastards got smart. Now they use secure file-sharing websites that don't keep records of what they're storing. They upload a file like to some cloud computing site and it's immediately encrypted and accessible only with the right passkey. People don't trade files anymore. They sell those passkeys. But get this, the file isn't just encrypted to outsiders, it's encrypted to the website as well. They absolve themselves of any kind of liability because they have no way of knowing what they're storing."
"Why would any company want to do that?" Reynaldo said. "Don't they realize what people are doing with the technology?"
Amelia smiled sadly and said, "It's a brave new technological world. People are fighting to keep the internet free by any means necessary, and if it means child pornographers have an easier time of things, so be it."
"That's disgusting," Reynaldo said.
"It gets better. They're not selling the passkeys for regular money anymore either. Now they're trading in digital currency that isn't tied to any government. The money's completely virtual and completely untraceable. Perfect for drug dealers, child pornographers, you name it."
"But how do you spend it?" Frank said. "Last time I checked the supermarket wasn't accepting digital currency."
"Not yet," Amelia said.
"But a lot of companies are starting to. And the ones that aren't accepting it yet are investing in it heavily, believe me."
"So if I want to buy a kilo of cocaine from you, I email you the money?" Frank said.
"No, because emails would be tied to a real person. Digital currency is stored in wallets online that can be accessed from anywhere, as long as you know the right code. Each wallet can have as many different codes as you want."
"Almost like a digital Swiss Bank Account?" Frank said.
"Exactly."
"If you seize a suspect's computer can you analyze it to find the wallet?" Frank said.
"The wallet's not stored in the computer. It's in a cloud on some unknown server in East Shitstania. Same as the child porn files. The only thing a search warrant analysis would reveal is a computer containing a bunch of seemingly random numbers."
"So is that what Phelps did?" Frank said. "He started using all this encrypted shit?"
"Most likely," Amelia said. "Our previous intel was that he was buying and selling child pornography files on a regular basis for over a year, and then he suddenly stopped."
"Do you think he got spooked?" Reynaldo said.
"Maybe, but that would only last a little while. Guys like this can't change what they are. Let me ask you a question. If sex with a woman became illegal tomorrow would you become gay?"
Reynaldo's eyebrows raised at Amelia's question and he said, "No."
"You'd still find a nice pair of tits and a juicy ass attractive, right?"
"Probably, yeah," Reynaldo said uncomfortably.
"Exactly," Amelia said. "You'd just be real careful who you told and get real good at finding ways to hide it. It's the same thing they do."
"Okay," Frank said, getting up from where he was leaning against the wall. "Thanks for the lesson, we really appreciate it. We're going to leave the Phelps file with you so you can add it to your case. I'm sure your team of fine Federal investigators will crack the case in no time. It was good to see you."
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